“Why do we want all these people from shithole countries coming here?” the President quipped during a briefing on immigration policy in January. A few days earlier, he had announced his plan to cancel Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for an estimated 262,500 Salvadoran immigrants living in the United States.
AP Images
El Salvador Gang Violence
A masked and armed policeman patrols a gang-controlled neighborhood in San Salvador, El Salvador. The daily violence in El Salvador has prompted a mass wave of immigration to the U.S.
In recent months, Trump has also cancelled temporary protection for Nicaragua, Haiti, and Sudan—and came close to canceling it for citizens of conflict-ridden Honduras and Syria as well.
El Salvador leads all nations in participation in the TPS program, which allows migrants from a list of countries experiencing a natural disaster or protracted conflict to live and work legally in the United States for renewable eighteen-month periods. It was first implemented in 1990, as thousands of Salvadorans were arriving to the United States due to a twelve-year civil war that killed more than 75,000 people. Another wave of Salvadoran immigrants arrived in 2001, when a 7.6 magnitude earthquake once again devastated the country, causing landslides and building collapses that left thousands homeless and in need of refuge.
And then there is the crippling gang violence that is now ravaging their home country. In fact, El Salvador has the dubious distinction of being the deadliest country in the world that is not technically in a war zone. Murder, rape, and violent crime are everyday events. This is the country to which these refugees will be forced to return, some to face reprisals for events in their past.
“Many of these immigrants will go back to areas or communities that are deprived, have few social services and little state presence—and are ruled by gangs,” says José Miguel Cruz, the director of research at Florida International University’s Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center and an expert on criminal violence and gangs in Latin America.
“For most people, this is not an actual choice,” he continues. “Instead, they will more likely choose to stay in the United States, but under the radar.”
But what happens if they are caught—and deported? Enter an unlikely player: Qatar.
What happens if they are caught—and deported? Enter an unlikely player: Qatar.
“The kingdom of Qatar . . . has held out the possibility of an agreement with El Salvador whereby Salvadoran workers could be brought across in phases [to Qatar],” Salvadoran presidential spokesman Eugenio Chicas told reporters, shortly after Trump announced his decision to repeal Salvadorans’ Temporary Protected Status.
In other words, the Salvadoran government is working on a plan for deportees to be rerouted to Qatar, to work as migrant laborers, most likely on the multibillion dollar World Cup 2022 infrastructure.
“We are negotiating [the possibility of sending] temporary workers—very, very qualified people, engineers who work in the maintenance of aircraft and mechanics,” Salvadoran Foreign Minister Hugo Martínez told reporters during a recent visit to Qatar.
That same week, the two countries—who while enjoying cordial relations have rarely found a reason to collaborate—signed an agreement opening the door to a direct flight between Doha and San Salvador. That suggests that both countries are anticipating increased travel between the two nations.
To get a sense of what may await these displaced Salvadorans, one need only look at the kafala system, the labor sponsorship program that governs the rights of foreign laborers in many Gulf states. Kafala allows citizens of one country to sponsor visas and legal status for foreign employees, who typically work in the construction or domestic sectors.
Proponents of kafala claim it gives citizens of impoverished countries—typically in Southeast Asia and Africa—employment opportunities that would be impossible to find back home. Critics argue that it opens the door to abuse, binding migrant workers to their employers, who are allowed to withhold wages. The International Trade Union Confederation describes it as modern-day slavery.
In Qatar, foreign workers make up about 90 percent of the country’s population. As the oil-rich Gulf nation prepares to host the 2022 World Cup, it is spending up to $500 million per week on infrastructure projects, including but not limited to a new airport, twelve stadiums, and dozens of new roads and hotels. It is expected to be one of the most expensive and opulent World Cups in the history of the event.
But the construction workers building these projects—mostly migrant workers from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and other South Asian countries—are often earning as little as $200 per month, the foreign labor minimum wage. There have been cases in which employers have confiscated workers’ passports, taking away their chance to go home, effectively trapping them in an abusive environment.
Some workers, according to a 2014 exposé in The Guardian, don’t see their wages for months at a time, if at all. If they question their work conditions, they are often threatened.
“When I first complained about my situation, soon after arriving in Qatar, the manager said, ‘If you complain, you can, but there will be consequences. If you want to stay in Qatar, be quiet and keep working,’ ” a Nepalese metalworker told Amnesty International researchers. The quote is included in the group’s 2016 report “The Ugly Side of the Beautiful Game,” examining labor conditions among migrant workers.
“Now I am forced to stay in Qatar and continue working.”
In October 2017, Qatar reached a deal to begin reforming the kafala system. The government made several concessions, ending passport confiscation and preventing the practice of workers arriving in the country only to have their employment contracts altered. Qatar also promised to stop employers from trapping their laborers in the country without visas.
But critics contend that the core of the system remains intact. For instance, workers are still not allowed to change jobs without their employer’s permission. And a previous effort to reform the kafala system had little effect.
“The reality is that workers on their sites still live under Qatar’s repressive sponsorship system, which gives employers powerful tools to abuse them,” commented James Lynch, deputy director of Amnesty International’s Global Issues Program.
And Nicholas McGeehan, a human rights researcher, recently told Reuters: “The fear is that they won’t follow up on the pledges and they will stall. That they are looking to buy time, and until we actually see one concrete step as evidence of their good faith, I think those fears are likely to remain.”
In addition to being trapped in the country, threatened, and earning next to nothing, Qatar’s migrant workers are forced to work long hours in extreme heat and humidity, with temperatures reaching as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit in July or August. When they are not at work they are at “home,” where they live six to eight men to a room in squalid work camps outside the city center. With at least forty men sharing one bathroom, the workers are living in filth, and many suffer from chronic hygiene-related health problems.
Qatar has yet to release the exact numbers—and causes—of labor-related deaths during the World Cup construction thus far, despite repeated calls for an independent investigation. However, it is known that at least 964 Nepalese, Bangladeshi, and Indian workers died during the first two years of the project, and that during the year 2014, one Nepalese worker was dying every two days. The cause of death was almost always either directly or indirectly related to the work, with heat stroke and sudden cardiac arrest being the most common.
The International Trade Union Confederation has calculated that, if this trend continues, 4,000 workers will have died by the time the World Cup “kicks off.”
In the United States, Salvadoran immigrants have established deep roots as legal residents, with many living in the country for more than twenty years. According to The Economist, about 90 percent are working and one third are homeowners. Then there are the parents, or even grandparents, of U.S.-born children. Getting their legal status revoked would mean that they would lose their livelihood, and be at risk of being deported, and separated from their families.
Few will voluntarily return to El Salvador. Most fled impoverished areas decades ago, that now, in addition to a crippling lack of employment opportunities, are run by deadly gangs.
Today, unwanted in their adopted country and at risk at home, Salvadorans face the prospect of becoming forced laborers in a country to which they have no connection.
Anna Lekas Miller is a freelance journalist who covers stories of foreign policy and humanity across the Middle East. Follow her on Twitter @agoodcuppa.