Various forms of unfree labor have been a feature of U.S. society since the first tobacco plantations were established in the early English colonies. From trapping English and Irish immigrants in indentured servitude to subjecting kidnapped Africans to chattel slavery, and from tying freedmen to plantations in Jim Crow-era sharecropping arrangements to exploiting Mexican Bracero guest workers and interned Japanese Americans during World War II, the U.S. economy has always relied on the exploitation of socially marginalized and legally vulnerable workforces.
Today, the U.S. agriculture industry in particular continues to depend overwhelmingly on undocumented workers excluded from U.S. citizenship and threatened by potential deportation—and thus at an immense power disadvantage with their fully enfranchised, politically connected employers.
Various forms of unfree labor have been a feature of U.S. society since the first tobacco plantations were established in the early English colonies. From trapping English and Irish immigrants in indentured servitude to subjecting kidnapped Africans to chattel slavery, and from tying freedmen to plantations in Jim Crow-era sharecropping arrangements to exploiting Mexican Bracero guest workers and interned Japanese Americans during World War II, the U.S. economy has always relied on the exploitation of socially marginalized and legally vulnerable workforces.
Today, the U.S. agriculture industry in particular continues to depend overwhelmingly on undocumented workers excluded from U.S. citizenship and threatened by potential deportation—and thus at an immense power disadvantage with their fully enfranchised, politically connected employers.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is making undocumented workers more vulnerable than ever by simultaneously hardening exclusionary immigration policies while expanding guest worker programs. Despite running on a pledge to purge the country with mass deportations, visa programs such as the H-2A and H-2B are actually increasing the size of the foreign workforce.
According to labor unions, anti-trafficking groups, and migrant advocates, these guest worker programs are also rife with abuse, including human trafficking, forced labor, sexual assault, wage theft, and even incidents of what U.S. prosecutors have called “modern-day slavery.”
If the exploitation of migrant labor sounds familiar to World Cup fans, it’s because we heard a lot about it four years ago in the run-up to the 2022 Men’s World Cup in Qatar. Dozens of migrant workers within Qatar’s infamous “kafala” system died during the construction of new football stadiums, prompting an outpouring of outrage from around the world, including from some footballers themselves.
The 2026 Men’s World Cup, co-hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada, kicked off last week, with 78 of 104 matches set to be played on U.S. soil over the next month. Understandably, far greater scrutiny over treatment of migrant workers was directed at Qatar, where laborers were much more directly involved in building physical tournament infrastructure. (By contrast, the United States is utilizing already-existing stadiums.) Yet the tournament still offers an opportunity to revisit a broader discussion about exploitative labor systems in the United States, which bear striking similarities to Qatar’s kafala regime.
The kafala system—from the Arabic word “kafeel,” meaning “sponsor”—is best defined as a labor migration scheme in which noncitizen migrant workers (excluded from the host nation’s political community) rely on visa and work permit sponsorship by employers (members of the host nation’s political community). When workers are completely dependent on their employer for their continued presence in the country, they cannot easily seek better wages or working conditions elsewhere.
Since the end of the British colonial period, the kafala system has been a crucial pillar of the social orders and economies of the Arab Gulf. A noncitizen workforce has driven the evolution of states such as Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates into major oil and gas exporters while allowing citizens—often now in the minority relative to the migrant worker population—a luxurious lifestyle funded by energy.
This noncitizen workforce can be deported as soon as it becomes politically inconvenient. Prior to the 1990-91 Gulf War, for example, Palestinians made up a large portion of Kuwait’s labor force but were easily expelled en masse by the government for allegedly siding with former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s invading forces. Amid the current Iran war, the UAE has deported possibly thousands of Pakistani Shiite workers, who are seen as potential “fifth columnists” for Iran, and denied them from years’ worth of savings—wage theft cloaked in national security justifications.
Similar instances have occurred in the United States: In 1986, the government deported hundreds of striking Jamaican sugarcane harvesters on H-2 visas in South Florida.
The parallels don’t end there. The primary function of U.S. immigration policy, particularly under Trump, is labor exploitation. Rather than reducing the size of the foreign labor force as advertised, the administration is actively working to codify dependence on migrant labor via kafala-style guest worker programs. These efforts include lowering wages for the H-2A visa program for temporary agricultural workers, which has no statutory visa cap or annual limit, while expanding its reach. Recent reports indicate that U.S. farm labor contractors are seeking to recruit H-2A workers from Uzbekistan.
U.S. officials have pointed to the labor shortages created by their own mass deportation raids as justification for these policies, arguing that increased immigration enforcement has left farms in need of a larger pool of lower-cost workers. Although the United Farm Workers is suing in federal court to reverse these wage cuts, the net effect is that more, not less, foreigners will work in U.S. agriculture than ever. American agriculture worker wages will inevitably be driven down as well, a seemingly clear betrayal of the Make America Great Again movement’s “America First” principles.
Beyond agriculture, almost every sector of the U.S. economy relies on migrant labor. The Trump administration is seeking to transition undocumented workers to guest worker status by unilaterally doubling the number of H-2B visas issued for industries such as hospitality, while congressional Republicans have introduced legislative proposals to create a new H-2C guest worker program for the construction industry. Each of these moves makes the U.S. labor system increasingly legally akin to the Gulf kafala systems.
And just as migrants died in the construction of Qatari football stadiums, the lives of migrant laborers in the United States are unvaryingly precarious. As many as 5 million undocumented immigrants may have been designated “essential workers” during the COVID-19 pandemic. And when the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, collapsed in 2024, it was unsurprising to learn that all six of the construction workers killed while working the overnight shift were immigrants from Latin America, with some likely undocumented. (Indeed, the Trump administration is now seeking to deport one of the victims’ loved ones.)
Despite these parallels between the United States and the Gulf, however, Qatar and other Arab states are often held to a higher moral standard than the West (an irony captured in a withering political cartoon by Matt Wuerker about the hypocrisies revealed by the 2022 World Cup). Despite the long history of unfree labor in the United States and Europe’s global empires, the kafala system is often exotified as a uniquely oriental form of exploitation, its many similarities to Western societies ignored.
Indeed, given that the majority of kafala workers in the Gulf come from South Asia, it can be argued that the kafala labor flows are in their own way a remnant of the British colonial period, with a native Arab ruling class substituted for a European one.
[break]
Understandably, concerns related to the impact of Trump’s immigration policies on this year’s World Cup have focused more on the potential impacts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and visa bans on fans and the players themselves, while questions around where the Iranian national team would be allowed to play and stay have dominated discourse. (Iran is reluctantly playing its matches on U.S. soil, but the team is staying at a base camp in Tijuana, Mexico.)
It is also true that labor protections are much stronger in the United States, so migrant workers are more organized and empowered than their counterparts in the Gulf. A coalition of labor unions extracted concessions ahead of World Cup events held in Seattle while largely immigrant stadium workers in Los Angeles won a new union contract after threatening to strike—a display of bargaining power unimaginable in Qatar.
Yet even if the exploitation of migrant workers in the United States occurs somewhat farther from the football pitch than it did in Qatar, this World Cup is unfolding in a society just as dependent on migrant labor, inviting a similar reckoning. Workers are killed by the heat in American fields just as they were while building Qatari stadiums. In both countries, migrant women report sexual abuse at the hands of visa sponsors and employers, and workers who advocate to improve their conditions risk deportation or the loss of their legal status.
Indeed, the most significant difference may be the United States’ own hypocrisy on the matter: While aggressively deporting undocumented migrants, the country continues to expand programs designed to entrench its dependence on their labor.
If football fans, players, and media interrogate and speak out against these realities, they can effect real change even in the least democratic of political systems. While reform efforts remain deeply flawed, the focus on the kafala system ahead of the 2022 World Cup resulted in a commitment by the Qatari government to better treatment for migrant workers, most notably in the passage of laws against the confiscation of workers’ passports by employers. (This particular form of abuse continues to unfold in the United States despite its technical illegality.)
The 2026 World Cup is an opportunity for the international community to once again raise its voice on behalf of exploited migrant workers in the host country. Migrant workers may not run the United States or the Gulf, but they make both run. This World Cup, they are definitely the ones who the world should be rooting for.
