“The Men in the Middle” (Excerpt)

P. Marusamy had just turned twenty-nine when I met him and his friends in early 2014 at a roadside tea shop in Govindanagaram, a bucolic village in the agricultural heartland of Tamil Nadu, India. The other men joked around a little while trading harsh stories of working overseas, but Marusamy seemed haunted by defeat. Five years ago, he had sold his family’s sole piece of property—a small plot of farmland—and borrowed $2,000 to pay the man who had promised him a lucrative job in the Middle East in exchange for a hefty fee. The man had come from Chennai, the closest metropolis, and said he represented a recruiting agency that was scouting for cooks to work for an international company in the Gulf that would pay $800 a month. Marusamy couldn’t believe his luck; his technical diploma in catering had paid off. He could repay his loan within a few months and earn enough money to buy a house in a few years. Within weeks, everything fell into place and he was on a plane to Kuwait.

But once he got there, Marusamy was shuttled to a small room holding nine other men, all weary from waiting. He spent weeks locked inside that room with no money, no job, barely any food, and no communication with his family; “it was like house arrest,” he recalled. Three months later, he was sent back home with no explanation. Soon after Marusamy’s return, his moneylender—a wealthy neighbor—accosted him and threatened to rough up his father if he didn’t pay the mounting interest on his loan. Marusamy was running out of options when the agent resurfaced and assured him that things would work out if he chose to try again. After some hesitation, Marusamy agreed. But he never saw the agent or his money again. A year later his father died from the stress of being hounded by the loan shark. Marusamy curses the day he met the agent, but adds quietly that his only hope of closing his debts is to find another job in the Gulf—through another agent. He currently makes less than $5 a day as a part-time electrician and owes his neighbor $1,500.

Unscrupulous middlemen like the agent who deceived Marusamy aren’t an anomaly; they’re the lowest rung of a remarkably successful recruitment model that for decades has drawn tens of millions of economic migrants across the Indian Ocean to fill working-class jobs in the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf. After the oil boom of the 1970s, the Gulf states sourced most of their labor from beyond their borders—increasingly turning to the populous nations of South Asia—and developed a carefully regulated system of migration that was designed in part to limit the rights of non-citizen workers and keep labor unrest at a minimum.