Middlesex University Research Repository makes the University's research available electronically.Copyright and moral rights to this work are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners unless otherwise stated. The work is supplied on the understanding that any use for commercial gain is strictly forbidden. A copy may be downloaded for personal, non-commercial, research or study without prior permission and without charge.Works, including theses and research projects, may not be reproduced in any format or medium, or extensive quotations taken from them, or their content changed in any way, without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder(s). They may not be sold or exploited commercially in any format or medium without the prior written permission of the copyright holder(s).Full bibliographic details must be given when referring to, or quoting from full items including the author's name, the title of the work, publication details where relevant (place, publisher, date), pagination, and for theses or dissertations the awarding institution, the degree type awarded, and the date of the award.If you believe that any material held in the repository infringes copyright law, please contact the Repository Team at Middlesex University via the following email address:eprints@mdx.ac.ukThe item will be removed from the repository while any claim is being investigated. Introduction: The Problem of Marriage MigrationIn Europe, as elsewhere, many states find migration through marriage or equivalent relationship particularly problematic. Reconciling the desire to limit immigration, at least by certain types of immigrant, with responsibilities to citizens who engage in transnational family life is a major preoccupation. Unlike labour migration, the admission of family members is a function of the citizenship rights of those already within the state which cannot, in a liberal democracy, be denied recognition.National laws thus provide for the admission of family members even when opportunities for labour migration have closed and family,including spousal, migration is now the dominant form of entry into many European states, representing around one half of legal migration into the EU in the early 2000s and one third in 2011. 1 States cannot easily select this large group of migrants for skills, education, cultural similarity or the other criteria applied to labour migrants but a trend towards greater restrictiveness has been observed in a number of states dating back to 1980.2 Family migration is also the site of tension between supra-national and domestic legal systems although it is not immediately obvious why this should be. Supra-national legal norms generally exist * The support of the Nuffield Foundation for the research discussed in this article is gratefully acknowledged. This article is concerned with similarity in national regimes of spousal migration.It is a snapshot not a convergence study and does not look at increasing similarity over time. The main explanatory frameworks for conver...

Many labour migrants in the Arab Gulf countries are from South Asia. Necessary to local economies, they enjoy few rights and protections from host states, particularly when accused of serious crimes. Our original empirical data suggests a disproportionate number of Pakistanis sentenced to death and executed in Saudi Arabia and we explore explanations within a wider discussion of the place and experiences of South Asian migrants in the Gulf. Our data suggest that drug laws and penal policies leave migrant workers particularly susceptible to capital punishment, with the administration of migrant employment recruitment processes exposing Pakistanis to coercion into drug trafficking such that some could be regarded not as criminally liable but as victims of human trafficking.

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This article focuses on the cases of 664 foreign nationals, the majority of whom are migrant workers, under sentence of death across the Gulf states (including Jordan and Lebanon) between 2016 and 2021. The features of these cases suggest that they are inextricably linked to migrant workers’ dependency under the kafala system, with examples of migrants duped into smuggling drugs across the border by their migrant broker, and once in country, accounts of violent altercations due to disputes about exit visas, and in the case of migrant domestic workers, self-defence against sexual violence. Engaging with the burgeoning literature on immigration, exploitation and criminalisation, as well as scholarship on capital punishment, this article will explore the multiple and unique layers of dependency fostered by the kafala system that place migrant workers at higher risk of the death penalty in these Gulf jurisdictions.

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