"Combating" Trafficking in Persons: An Examination of the Role of the United States in Qatar's Exploitative Guestworker Program

Abstract

Contemporary scholarship contends that guestworker programs are structurally exploitative enabling labor trafficking of vulnerable migrant communities. Such programs are common throughout the globe, though none are as infamous as those with roots in the Persian Gulf. Most notable of the Gulf countries, Qatar imports over 80% of their labor force through their guestworker program known as the Kafala system; a system notoriously beset with human rights abuses. The United States has tapped into this massive labor pool, employing thousands of migrant workers on Department of Defense contracts at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, a post they have held since the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Through an examination of DoD labor trafficking policy over time, a trend was discovered which unveiled that policy, in most cases, made no mention of the vulnerabilities unique to guestworkers. Therefore, this thesis argues for a shift in policymaking from reactively responding to labor trafficking incidents to proactively combating the sources of labor trafficking, which starts with an understanding of the host country, in this case, Qatar.