The Foreign Service Journal, December 2013

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2013 33 hard work, Jennie came to Jordan because she wanted to do more for her family. In Amman, she became active in a local church of guest workers. Through these relationships, she found friendship, wisdom and support. Each pay period, Jennie sent money home, but her older siblings actually dictated how the funds were dispersed. Jennie admitted once that she knew her older brothers often squan- dered the money, and that it did not reach her mother: “The last time I was in the Philippines, I tried to teach my mother how to sign her name so she could get the money. But she is illiterate, Madam. She has worked so hard all her life. But she knows almost nothing of the money I send home.” What Now? Over the years, I became more accustomed to the murky moral complexity of kafala, as well as to the tired arguments trot- ted out to support it. The same arguments were once used to jus- tify the American enslavement of Africans; for example, “Their lives are so much better off here than where they are from.” Life is simply hard—cradle to grave—for most of these work- ers. For the women, the money they earn is often no more theirs than before they earned it. They face strong pressure from agen- cies and family members who rely on their remittances, as do the governments of their home countries, whose economies are not keeping pace with ever-increasing populations. The women also may be misled about the life of a domestic worker in the Middle East, believing that some of the Middle East’s reportedly gold-paved streets might become a path of wealth for them, as well. But the migration laws of kafala and the seething poverty of their countries of origin leave themwith few good options. Kafala’s notoriously ignoble margins should be treated as a front in the battle against global human trafficking, one of the most pressing international issues of our time. Thinking about it in those terms may be uncomfortable, perhaps because so many of us are entangled in it even though we hardly think of ourselves as being actively involved in human trafficking. I’ve become more convinced, however, that those margins matter. After researching and witnessing the fallout from kafala, one Foreign Service officer I talked to while preparing this essay said that, as a form of resistance to the entire system, she refuses to employ any domestic worker. Another officer said that employ- ing another person to clean your house under sponsorship laws is “un-American.” I respect these positions, and I wonder how many others in the Foreign Service have taken that kind of bold stand against kafala.