Migrant workers in Saudi Arabia

Employers take the workers’ passports and travel papers upon their arrival. If a worker quits, strikes, or flees from an abusive situation, he will be unable to return home. With loans hanging over their heads, and a family depending upon every penny of their meager earnings, the workers are trapped. Skilled workers are reduced to performing demeaning labor; female domestic workers endure abuse and ill-treatment.

They were workers unable to depart from Saudi Arabia and return home to their home countries. The workers stated that their employers had engaged in deceptive employment practices, and when the workers quit in protest, their companies refused to return their passports or grant them travel documents.

Many workers seek to return home by getting deported. They form tent cities, and wait for the immigration police to pick them up and take them to a deportation center. Nearly a thousand workers live under the Sitteen Bridge, in the Kandara region of Jeddah, in a squalid encampment. They depend on a local mosque for drinking water; they have no sanitation facilities and no reliable source of food.

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ca 20 photos available (very diffecult to take photos in Saudi Arabia)