the immigrant war
a relentless campaign of exploitation, violence, and discrimination
On average, two coffins arrive at Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu every day. They carry the bodies of Nepali migrant workers—bricklayers, drivers, domestic servants—who went to the Persian Gulf seeking work and came back in wooden boxes. No flags cover these coffins. No state funerals. Just families loading remains onto small Toyota vans, disappearing into the valley, embarrassed by the tragic conclusion of journeys that began full of hope.
This is one scene from a global phenomenon most people never see.
Journalist Vittorio Longhi spent years documenting what he calls “the immigrant war”—a relentless campaign of exploitation, violence, and discrimination against migrant workers that spans four continents.
His conclusion is uncomfortable: the world’s advanced economies depend on a system that treats foreign workers as disposable, and the contradictions of this system are now exploding.
Consider the numbers. In the Persian Gulf states, foreign workers outnumber locals by more than two to one.
They built Dubai’s glittering towers, Qatar’s World Cup stadiums, Saudi Arabia’s gleaming malls.
Yet they live in overcrowded work camps on dirt roads, paid wages that wouldn’t cover a single night in the Armani Hotel occupying floors of the Burj Khalifa they constructed.
The hotel charges €700 a night.
The workers who built it earned around $200 a month for 12-hour days, six days a week.
One of them was Athiraman Kannan, a 38-year-old Indian laborer who had spent a decade in the Gulf.
In May 2011, after his employer Arabtec refused to let him return home following his brother’s death, he jumped from the 147th floor of the world’s tallest building.
Here’s the mechanism that makes this possible.
Throughout the Gulf, migrant workers operate under a system called kafala, or sponsorship, which binds them to a single employer who controls their visa, can confiscate their passport, and has the power to prevent them from leaving the country.
As the U.S. State Department noted in a report on Qatar, this arrangement “may lead to forced labour activities under conditions of slavery.”
Now here’s what gets interesting.
The same dynamic appears thousands of miles away in entirely different contexts.
In the United States, Central American guest workers on H-2 visas find themselves similarly trapped, their status tied to employers who can deport them simply by picking up the phone to immigration authorities.
David Bacon, who has spent decades covering labor issues, documented case after case of workers having passports confiscated, wages withheld, and complaints silenced with threats of deportation.
A Guatemalan laborer named Juan described the situation bluntly:
“The boss took away our passports as soon as we arrived from Mexico. If my passport lets me be here legally, what do I do to show I’m not illegal?”
The Southern Poverty Law Center investigated the H-2 program and found conditions that would be familiar to any worker in the Gulf work camps—wages well below legal minimums, squalid housing in containers and prefabs without electricity, and a system where, as their report stated, “the rights of immigrants end up being wiped out” because the employer holds absolute power.
But the story doesn’t end with exploitation. Something else is happening too.
In April 2008, nine cooks at La Grande Armée restaurant in Paris—a prestigious establishment frequented by politicians, celebrities, and President Nicolas Sarkozy himself—shut down the kitchen and went on strike. They were sans papiers, undocumented workers, and they had decided they were tired of being invisible.
The strike revealed that one of the most exclusive restaurants in Paris depended on workers without papers who had been employed for years under false documents. Raymond Chauveau, coordinator for undocumented workers at France’s largest trade union, the CGT, saw an opportunity.
What Marx had called the “industrial reserve army”—workers kept deliberately vulnerable to bring down wages—was beginning to organize.
Between 2007 and 2009, strikes by undocumented workers spread across the Paris region at a nearly monthly rate. Regularizations exceeded 6,000 in 2007, then 12,000 in 2008, then 13,600 in 2009. The employers and the Sarkozy government were caught off guard by workers who, as one Malian cook named Tama put it, wanted “to go all the way.”
Then came something larger.
On May 1, 2006, more than 1.5 million people took to the streets in 70 American cities to protest legislation that would have criminalized undocumented immigration.
In Los Angeles alone, 75 percent of companies employing immigrants came to a halt. Fruit rotted on trees in California and Arizona. Tyson Foods and Cargill Meat Solutions shut down factories.
The movement called itself “A Day Without Immigrants,” and it worked. The Sensenbrenner Bill—named for the Republican congressman who proposed making illegal presence in the country a felony—stalled in the Senate and eventually died.
Four years later, inspired by the American movement, activists in France launched “24 Hours Without Us.”
In Italy, after a wave of racist violence culminated in a genuine pogrom against African workers in the town of Rosarno, a similar “Day Without Us” brought 300,000 people into the streets. In Brescia, where anti-immigrant local ordinances had reached absurd heights—fining a Moroccan woman for sitting at the foot of a monument, citing Asian boys for playing cricket in a park—48 factories stopped production as metalworkers, both immigrant and Italian, walked out together.
What connects these movements is something the political analyst Immanuel Ness observed about the United States: migrants are often more inclined to organize and make demands than local workers. Where native workers have been socialized into individualism, immigrants frequently bring collectivist traditions built around family and community. They organize through migration networks, churches, social media—channels that bypass traditional institutions.
This capacity for resistance surfaced in the most unlikely place.
In 2007, workers at the Haji Hassan construction company in Bahrain, mostly from Nepal, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, refused to board the company buses that would take them to building sites.
For 24 hours, more than 1,600 workers stayed in their camp. It was the first major strike by migrants in the Persian Gulf construction sector.
The company capitulated. Wages increased. Overcrowding in dormitories was reduced from 9 to 5 per room. Air conditioning was installed. Most importantly, 900 more migrants immediately joined the union, recognizing that coordinated action could change conditions.
Trade unionists in the Gulf understand something crucial: the real leverage comes from building what they call a “bridge” between labor organizations in sending and receiving countries.
Nepali unions signed agreements with their counterparts in Bahrain and Kuwait.
Indian unions trained workers before departure and connected them with support structures upon arrival.
When a worker can rely on organized support from the moment they leave home until the moment they return, the power of unscrupulous employers and traffickers diminishes.
This matters because the alternative is what Vittorio Longhi documents throughout his book—bodies arriving at airports in anonymous wooden boxes, suicides from skyscrapers built by the deceased, workers beaten to death for demanding back wages.
In the Sicilian Channel alone, at least 5,962 people died attempting to reach Europe between 1994 and 2011. More than 4,500 of them are still missing, their bodies never recovered.
The former Minister of Employment of Bahrain, Majid Al Alawi, put it starkly:
“Under these conditions migrants are a time bomb, more dangerous than a nuclear bomb for the countries of the Gulf, if they do not make a start on reforms.”
He was talking about his own country. But he could have been talking about agriculture in southern Italy, where African workers pick tomatoes for €3 a box under the control of illegal labor recruiters.
He could have been talking about the Arizona desert, where more than 1,700 migrants have died trying to cross in the last ten years.
He could have been talking about the banlieues of Paris, where the descendants of immigrants live in conditions of soft segregation that exploded into riots in 2005.
The patterns converge.
Excessive restrictions on legal migration don’t stop movement—they make it deadlier, more exploitative, and more profitable for traffickers.
The contradiction between needing foreign workers and making their presence illegal creates exactly the reserve army that keeps wages down and working conditions degraded.
As Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, observed, borders are kept “closed enough to change migrants into second-class citizens and open enough to guarantee an infinite supply of low-cost manpower.”
Noam Chomsky called it the “international assault on labor.”
Antonio Gramsci would have recognized the need for what he called a “collective will” uniting precarious workers across national boundaries.
Whatever you call it, the fight is the same one that workers have always waged against capital, updated for an era when people move across borders as easily as goods and money do.
In August 2011, African farm laborers in Nardò, in Italy’s Puglia region, decided they had had enough.
For thirteen days they refused to work, blocking roads and demonstrating in the streets.
They were demanding something simple: compliance with the provincial labor contract that guaranteed €6 an hour instead of the €3 they were actually receiving.
The strike spread. It drew support from trade unions, anti-racist associations, and local activists. Most remarkably, it succeeded.
The Puglia Region created reservation lists allowing workers to be hired directly by companies, cutting out the illegal labor recruiters. National legislation followed, criminalizing the practice of illicit labor recruitment for the first time.
When asked about the strike, the Public Prosecutor of Lecce, Cataldo Motta, said something that could serve as an epitaph for the entire struggle:
“Immigrants have given us a great lesson in civilization, showing that you need not be afraid of denouncing crimes, and when denouncement becomes unanimous, any risk disappears.”
The immigrant war is real. But so is the resistance.
And increasingly, that resistance is connecting across borders, languages, and cultures to form what might eventually become a genuine global movement.
Whether it succeeds will determine not just the fate of migrants, but the future of labor everywhere.
Sources:
Longhi, V. (2013). The Immigrant War: A Global Movement Against Discrimination and Exploitation. Bristol: The Policy Press.
Carr, M. (2010). “The War Against Immigrants.” New York Times, November 8.
Chomsky, N. (2011). “The International Assault on Labor.” Truthout, May 4.
Foucault, M. (1997). Il faut défendre la société [Society Must Be Defended]. Paris: Hautes Études Seuil-Gallimard.
Bacon, D. (2008). Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. Boston: Beacon Press.
Southern Poverty Law Center (2013). Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States.
Human Rights Watch (2011). Domestic Plight: How Jordanian Laws, Officials, Employers, and Recruiters Fail Abused Migrant Domestic Workers.
International Labour Organization (2010). International Labour Migration: A Rights-Based Approach. Geneva: ILO.
Sayad, A. (1999). La Double Absence: Des illusions de l’émigré aux souffrances de l’immigré. Paris: Seuil.