food. Others were shunted to quarantine or detention
facilities, often in unsafe conditions that had been linked
to disease outbreaks even before the arrival of the
coronavirus.
Not surprisingly, these conditions led to outbreaks among
many migrant communities, says Ryszard Cholewinski,
senior migration specialist for the International Labour
Organization’s Regional Office for Arab States. “Through
no fault of their own, many migrants were unable to
observe basic precautions to protect themselves from the
virus” he told me. “And these communities were among the
most vulnerable in these Gulf countries, even before the
pandemic.” Despite spotty testing and data collection,
experts suggest that migrants have constituted the
majority of Covid-19 cases in several Gulf countries,
especially in the early months. Often, such spikes were
interpreted as the confirmation of xenophobic,
scapegoating narratives, including claims that migrants
were simply too dirty or reckless to avoid infection.
While some governments tried to move migrants from
crowded accommodations into empty buildings or offer
free testing, many of the efforts to “contain” the virus
amounted to simple abandonment. “Systemic racism and
discrimination against migrant workers in the Gulf has
been a problem for decades,” says Rima Kalush, director of
Migrant-Rights.org, a human rights group that focuses on
the GCC. “What this crisis has made clear is that migrant
workers have never been considered true members of
these societies—they are viewed as temporary sources of
labor, nothing more.”
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