Western Asia · data through 2024
Saudi Arabia is one of the world's largest destinations for contract labour, with workers from South Asia, Egypt, Yemen, and the Philippines.
Twenty five year view
These lines show migrant stock, meaning people living outside their birth country at each point in time. They do not show annual arrivals.
Why people move
Work is organised through a sponsorship system, reformed in recent years to allow more job mobility. Large construction and service projects continue to drive recruitment, and remittances out of the country are among the world's largest.
Connections
Common destinations
Egypt, United States, United Kingdom, Jordan
Common origins
India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt, Philippines, Yemen, Nepal
Adapting and finding support
Recruitment debt and employer tied permits are the central vulnerabilities, particularly in domestic work. Reforms have improved mobility for some sectors but not all.
Sending country embassies operate labour attachés and shelters, and they are the fastest route to help.
Use the support guideResearch that explains this pattern
Behavioural economics
Once a family has sold land, borrowed money, or crossed a border, the money and risk already spent make turning back feel unthinkable.
People continue on dangerous routes past the point where they would have chosen them fresh, and debt shapes the years after arrival.
Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer on the sunk cost effect, 1985
Anthropology
Sending money home is not only economic. It maintains standing, honours obligation, and keeps a person a member of the family they left.
People send money they cannot spare, and stopping carries social cost heavier than the financial one.
Marcel Mauss on the gift, applied in contemporary migration ethnography
Behavioural economics
Living with too little money, time, or certainty consumes attention itself, leaving less capacity for planning and paperwork.
Missed appointments and delayed applications are effects of hardship rather than proof of carelessness.
Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity, 2013
Support inside and beyond Saudi Arabia
Contract registration and complaint channels for domestic and contract workers.
Workers and employers in the kingdom
OpenStandards, guidance, and reporting routes on recruitment abuse.
Contract workers and advocates
OpenAssistance, voluntary return, reintegration, and counter trafficking support through the local office.
Anyone moving, arriving, or returning
OpenThese are public organisations. The project is not affiliated with them and cannot guarantee outcomes. Nothing here is legal advice or an emergency service.
Figures are rounded published estimates. Causes and adaptation differ within every country and should not be read as a verdict about any person.