6 ideas
The kafala system hands the state's power to regulate foreign labor to individual citizen-sponsors. Each sponsor controls a migrant's legal residency, right to change jobs, and ability to leave the country. Border and immigration authority is thereby spread across thousands of private households and firms, and each citizen becomes a small-scale gatekeeper of the state's labor regime.
Much of the harm to unskilled migrants is built into the system rather than caused by individual cruelty. Debt from recruitment fees, confiscated passports, withheld wages, and legal dependence on one employer make suffering routine and predictable. Seeing it as structural violence moves the question from 'who is the abusive employer' to 'which arrangements make abuse rational, cheap, and invisible.'
Unskilled laborers often borrow heavily or sell family land to pay recruitment brokers in India, sometimes for visas that the sponsors themselves sold. They arrive already owing sums that take years to repay. This makes them tolerate wage theft and bad conditions instead of going home, because returning would mean facing an unpaid debt.
A 'free visa' is a sponsorship that a citizen sells to a migrant without providing a real job. The migrant can then work informally, paying the sponsor a fee while staying legally tied to them. This gray market turns citizenship into a rentable asset: sponsors earn income simply for lending their legal status, and migrants gain flexibility at the price of greater vulnerability.
Indian migrants in Bahrain are not one group. Elite professionals and merchants, some from families settled for generations, share few interests with unskilled laborers.
Even migrants who stay for decades, or whose families have lived there for generations, stay legally temporary. This preserves citizens' privileges and keeps a hierarchy of insiders and permanent strangers.