return home, her isolation felt overwhelming. “There is no one to ask for help,” she says, adding that she would never have dreamed of going to Emirati authorities with her complaints. “The UAE government? What do they have to do with me?” Kalush says this is the experience of the vast majority of migrant workers in the Gulf, even among the many who face egregious violations such as wage theft, sexual harassment, or physical abuse. “Access to justice isn’t even a question for most. Even if a country theoretically allows you to file a complaint, it is very rare that a worker will have the courage to do so. Usually it leads to nothing—at the very least, you will spend months waiting for a ruling, usually without pay. And that is in the best of times—not in a pandemic.” N epali “Rasheed” Tamang (he asked that I use his nickname to protect his privacy) worked for two years at a warehouse in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, and said he routinely witnessed his coworkers accepting abusive treatment. “If we didn’t work fast enough, they would yell at us and threaten us. I saw them beating some people. If something went missing, we got charged huge fines. Once, a worker was hit by a forklift and broke his leg—and all we worried about was how they would punish us.” Fed up with this treatment, Tamang, 27, left at the end of his first twoyear contract, in 2018. “Now I am so glad I left.” Gurung, still stranded in Dubai, got word that her husband had fallen suddenly, seriously ill. She petitioned Transguard again to let her leave Dubai. The company continued to stall, but Gurung said she never considered going to the Nepali embassy for aid. She’d heard from fellow Nepalis that their government was unwilling, or