Someone asked me the same question on Reddit, so I’ll reproduce my reply:
[Same question as yours]
I do acknowledge the sampling bias here, and in hindsight I could have made a note of it. But I primarily did not bother because I do not think that bias might be large enough to affect my thesis.
Maybe a third of the patients I saw were there to renew an existing work permit. I must have spoken to dozens of people about their personal attitude towards work and life there, and I never heard anything very negative. The universal consensus was that it was better than the conditions at home.
>Those who chose to stay home or go elsewhere after their contract expired (and those who died) weren’t medically screened again, because it sounds like screening was only done during or prior to onboarding.
The death rate is tiny, almost inconsequential in absolute terms. As far as I can tell, I would have missed out on a fraction of a human individual even if considering the number of patients I personally reviewed were in the thousands.
Many people told me that they did not intend to stay in the Gulf indefinitely or even as long as allowed. They were content to work a decade or two, build up significant savings, and then come back to India to focus on family or do slower work while living off their savings. They earn in a year what they could make in a decade, and so even a short stint can set them up for a very long time if they’re prudent.
The primary dissatisfaction was core to any migrant: they were going to be far from home, far from family and friends in a foreign land. I can make the exact same complaint myself.
I was also not a direct employee of the Qatar government, they were using an Indian firm as a contractor. I think that the people I spoke to were largely honest with me, though it is a possibility that they might have been slightly concerned that bad-mouthing Qatar would cause them negative consequences.
[Followup comment and my own reply below]
I agree that I wouldn’t be able to see the people who chose not to go in the first place, but there are many other reasons for why someone might not be able to go too. Not every able-bodied person would be willing to emigrate in the first place, both because of personal preference and other familial obligations that keep them at home. Then there’s the fact that Qatar or the Middle East in general isn’t the only option for them, even if my understanding is that it’s one of the most significant/popular choices, so those put off by any negative reputation do have other choices (once again including not going at all).
Some (not necessarily you) might argue that there’s too much information asymmetry involved and that the workers don’t know what they’re getting into. If someone were to claim that (no has, at the time of writing), then I’d wave at the repeat customers, and that by 2023, even poor day laborers have smartphones and internet access, and do talk to each other and share information. It isn’t like the 80s, 90s or even the early 2000s, when workers were leaving with far less context at hand.
This is a subjective estimate, I wasn’t literally counting, but I think it’s reasonable and at least an honest impression. At the risk of being slightly pretentious, my 95% CI would be 20-50% of the cases were there to make a return. I have not actually checked official figures yet.
(Maybe I shouldn’t worry too much about being nerdy or particular, this is LessWrong after all. If we won’t tolerate it, who will?)
Just to add: oh, the number isn’t quite what I thought. It’s not “a third of people renew”, because the people who renew have to go through a first time first. It means “mean number of times a person renews” is 0.5. When someone renewed, I don’t know if you knew how many times they’d been. But I’d guess the distribution looks more like “half of people renew once” than like “a quarter of people renew twice”?
(I know it’s a rough number, and this is also making assumptions like “this is a steady state” and “the people you see aren’t selected for renewal”, but this seems like a useful order-of-magnitude calculation.)
I think that the records I had access to would have given me information regarding prior applications and stints, but I was quite busy and did not check regularly. Take my subjective impressions with an RDA-approved pinch of salt.
(If the exact proportion of returnees was load-bearing on my ethical arguments, I would have checked them more rigorously, and maybe I should have anyway)
While my particular workplace catered to a very large proportion of India, I do recall there were other visa centers, and circumstances and demographics could vary. I have no particular reason to think my situation wasn’t representative, but I will not declare so with strict confidence.
Most of the time, my recollection is that either I directly asked, or the patients mentioned it unprompted. I might even be underestimating the number of returnees, now that I consider it, it’s a distinct possibility.
I do think that a steady-state is a reasonable assumption. There is significant background demand for labor in Qatar, but I would assume that the boom before 2022 had died down for some time and things were back to “normal”. “Normal” still meant hundreds of applicants a day, a third of them seen by me personally.
Someone asked me the same question on Reddit, so I’ll reproduce my reply:
[Same question as yours]
I do acknowledge the sampling bias here, and in hindsight I could have made a note of it. But I primarily did not bother because I do not think that bias might be large enough to affect my thesis.
Maybe a third of the patients I saw were there to renew an existing work permit. I must have spoken to dozens of people about their personal attitude towards work and life there, and I never heard anything very negative. The universal consensus was that it was better than the conditions at home.
>Those who chose to stay home or go elsewhere after their contract expired (and those who died) weren’t medically screened again, because it sounds like screening was only done during or prior to onboarding.
The death rate is tiny, almost inconsequential in absolute terms. As far as I can tell, I would have missed out on a fraction of a human individual even if considering the number of patients I personally reviewed were in the thousands.
Many people told me that they did not intend to stay in the Gulf indefinitely or even as long as allowed. They were content to work a decade or two, build up significant savings, and then come back to India to focus on family or do slower work while living off their savings. They earn in a year what they could make in a decade, and so even a short stint can set them up for a very long time if they’re prudent.
The primary dissatisfaction was core to any migrant: they were going to be far from home, far from family and friends in a foreign land. I can make the exact same complaint myself.
I was also not a direct employee of the Qatar government, they were using an Indian firm as a contractor. I think that the people I spoke to were largely honest with me, though it is a possibility that they might have been slightly concerned that bad-mouthing Qatar would cause them negative consequences.
[Followup comment and my own reply below]
I agree that I wouldn’t be able to see the people who chose not to go in the first place, but there are many other reasons for why someone might not be able to go too. Not every able-bodied person would be willing to emigrate in the first place, both because of personal preference and other familial obligations that keep them at home. Then there’s the fact that Qatar or the Middle East in general isn’t the only option for them, even if my understanding is that it’s one of the most significant/popular choices, so those put off by any negative reputation do have other choices (once again including not going at all).
Some (not necessarily you) might argue that there’s too much information asymmetry involved and that the workers don’t know what they’re getting into. If someone were to claim that (no has, at the time of writing), then I’d wave at the repeat customers, and that by 2023, even poor day laborers have smartphones and internet access, and do talk to each other and share information. It isn’t like the 80s, 90s or even the early 2000s, when workers were leaving with far less context at hand.
nsequences.
Oh, that’s much more than I would have guessed!
This is a subjective estimate, I wasn’t literally counting, but I think it’s reasonable and at least an honest impression. At the risk of being slightly pretentious, my 95% CI would be 20-50% of the cases were there to make a return. I have not actually checked official figures yet.
(Maybe I shouldn’t worry too much about being nerdy or particular, this is LessWrong after all. If we won’t tolerate it, who will?)
Just to add: oh, the number isn’t quite what I thought. It’s not “a third of people renew”, because the people who renew have to go through a first time first. It means “mean number of times a person renews” is 0.5. When someone renewed, I don’t know if you knew how many times they’d been. But I’d guess the distribution looks more like “half of people renew once” than like “a quarter of people renew twice”?
(I know it’s a rough number, and this is also making assumptions like “this is a steady state” and “the people you see aren’t selected for renewal”, but this seems like a useful order-of-magnitude calculation.)
I think that the records I had access to would have given me information regarding prior applications and stints, but I was quite busy and did not check regularly. Take my subjective impressions with an RDA-approved pinch of salt.
(If the exact proportion of returnees was load-bearing on my ethical arguments, I would have checked them more rigorously, and maybe I should have anyway)
While my particular workplace catered to a very large proportion of India, I do recall there were other visa centers, and circumstances and demographics could vary. I have no particular reason to think my situation wasn’t representative, but I will not declare so with strict confidence.
Most of the time, my recollection is that either I directly asked, or the patients mentioned it unprompted. I might even be underestimating the number of returnees, now that I consider it, it’s a distinct possibility.
I do think that a steady-state is a reasonable assumption. There is significant background demand for labor in Qatar, but I would assume that the boom before 2022 had died down for some time and things were back to “normal”. “Normal” still meant hundreds of applicants a day, a third of them seen by me personally.