This book is the translated and updated version of Wangan Arab Shokoku no Imin Roudousya: Tagaikokujin Kokka no Shutsugen to Seikatsu Jittai (Migrant Workers in the Arab Gulf States: Growing Foreign Population and Their Lives) which was published in 2014 from Akashi Shoten in Tokyo, Japan.
Before we express our thanks to all of the people who shared their experiences and provided us with valuable advices and comments, we would like to mention our research background briefly. We started our first joint field research on Filipino migrants in Dubai in 2008. At that time, the Gulf cities were still economically booming, and migrants had been attracted from all over the world, although there were many negative and critical reports on their treatments there.
Even after the Dubai debt crisis in 2009 and the Arab Spring in 2011, most migrant communities have survived against the backdrop of rapid political, social and economic changes taking place in the Arab Gulf states. Today, the Arab Gulf states are considered as one of the main destinations of international migrant workers in the world. In the last decade, many scholars including us have been drawn into the region to investigate the society which consists of nationals (local citizens) and massive numbers of migrants. The dynamics of the migration phenomena and the multiplicity of the society cannot be understood from a single perspective, and thus, we organized a research team composed of both the scholars on Asian sending countries and on Arab Gulf host states and conducted joint field studies. In this way, the book adopts multi-dimensional and multidisciplinary approach: mix quantitative and qualitative approach and tries to provide new perspectives on the segregated socioeconomic spaces of the Arab Gulf states; from analysis of the policies and institutions which generate the segregated spaces to the ethnographic accounts on Asian migrant workers.
We would like to express our gratitude to Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), for granting us different funds through ten years; “Filipino Diasporas in an Open City in the Gulf States” from 2008 to 2010 (JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP20401007), “Ethnic Relations of Expatriate Workers: A Gulf Model” from 2011–2013 (JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP23401014), and “Neo-Plural Society: Research on Ethnic Group Relations with a Focus on Expatriate Workers in the Arab Gulf States” (JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP26257004) from 2015–2017. Without generous research grants, we could not have conducted comprehensive and long-term field studies in the Arab Gulf states and Asian sending countries.
We are also grateful for the assistance of Ms. Favita Dias (Goa University) at the time of our field research in Goa, India. We would like to show our gratitude to Mrs. Bienvenida C. Lacsaman and Mr. Rodolfo A. Lacsamana for helping us in our research in the Philippines as well as to Ms. Sherma Sappari for her kind guidance in Qatar. We are thankful for King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies for facilitating our fieldwork in Saudi Arabia and for the NGOs such as the Migrante International for providing us critical views on the migration issues.
As for the editing process of this book, we would like to thank anonymous reviewers for reading our manuscripts thoroughly and providing us critical but constructive comments. Our gratitude also goes to Ms. Kathryn Wright for her dedicated copy-editing work and Ms. Wendy Logeman, the Brill’s editor, for leading us to the publication. Many thanks also to Professor Emiko Ochiai (Kyoto University) and Dr. Wako Asato (Kyoto University) for kindly let us join the series of The Intimate and the Public in Asian and Global Perspectives of the Brill. We would also like to thank Akashi Shoten for kindly giving us a permission for publishing of this translated and updated version. Also, without the supports by our project office staffs at Kyoto University, Kagawa University, and Rikkyo University, we could not have managed our research project smoothly.
Lastly but not the least, it should be noted that we met a lot of people with various backgrounds in both sending and receiving countries during our ten-years of research projects: not only migrants who stayed and worked at the Arab Gulf states, but also employers, recruitment agents, politicians, government officials, academics, journalists, school teachers and students, NGO staff, as well as the family members who are waiting for their beloved ones to come
The editors