2/Lebanon's Kafala System is 'Civilized' Slavery (with Sami and Ali)

This is part one of a two-parts series on the Kafala system in Lebanon.

Under Lebanon's Kafala (or sponsorship) system, the legal status of migrant domestic workers is in the hands of their employers, making workers vulnerable to abuse. If the employer terminates their contract, the sponsorship gets automatically cancelled, turning these workers into illegal aliens and putting them at risk of arrest and/or deportation.

In this first episode, we go back to the summer of 2018 when I sat down with Sami, a Beirut-based Ethiopian activist with, Mesewat, a solidarity network that supports migrant workers in Lebanon and the Middle East, and Ali, an activist with the Anti-Racism Movement. It was recorded at one of the Migrant Community Centers in Beirut.

If you like this podcast, please review us wherever you get your podcasts and share it with your social networks. It is currently available on Anchor, Breaker, Google Podcasts, Radio Public, Spotify, Pocket Casts, and RSS. More to come!

The second episode is being recorded in the next few days so you should find it wherever you get your podcasts by the end of March.

You can already read the show notes for the Kafala series here: https://thefirethisti.me/2020/03/10/kafalasystem/

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Music by Tarabeat https://soundcloud.com/tarabeat/