Guest workers often live in villas that “vary from unfinished to decrepit,” several men to a bedroom, kitchen, or toilet, with inadequate sanitation on the outskirts of the urban centers. There are also laws that limit when and where they can take their weekend breaks, even to the point of barring them from certain public parks, beaches, and during certain times of the day – a restriction that Human Rights Watch says is primarily enforced against South Asians, and not Western or Arab expats. As Andrew Gardner and Autumn Watts – anthropologists studying transnational migration in the Gulf – these workers are Invisible Men and Women. They are the largest single demographic in some of these states, but are effectively unseen unless they gather in such numbers to inspire unease among full citizens:
“Labor migrants are, of course, visible everywhere in the city — in large work crews, in matching uniforms, on the buses that carry them between Labor camps and construction sites — but those encounters from a distance are the limits of typical interaction between them and the middle and upper classes of both foreigners and citizens who make a home, however temporary, on the peninsula.”