Systemic exploitation of Horn of Africa migrants: trafficking networks, Saudi labor demand, and state complicity exposed

The trafficking of Ethiopian migrants to Saudi Arabia is not an aberration but a predictable outcome of intersecting systems: IMF-mandated austerity in the Horn, the Gulf’s *kafala* regime, and the EU’s border militarization which funnels migrants into traffickers’ hands.

Historically, this route has been a corridor of both exploitation (Ottoman slave trade) and resilience (pastoralist migration), but colonial borders and neoliberal policies severed these indigenous systems. The power knowledge audit reveals how Western media and NGOs frame the crisis as a 'humanitarian emergency' to absolve Gulf states and Western actors of complicity, while marginalizing Yemeni war profiteers and Saudi domestic workers who have organized alternatives. Future modeling suggests that without dismantling *kafala* and investing in regional labor agreements, climate displacement will triple trafficking by 2030. The solution pathways—debt swaps, transit corridors, legal networks—must be co-designed with Afar elders, Ethiopian unions, and Yemeni activists to avoid replicating extractive models. True systemic change requires recognizing migration not as a crisis to manage, but as a right to protect.