The Exit Permit Edition
On Kuwait, closed airspace, and bureaucratic traps.
Colin here. This week, Semafor reported that some expats in Kuwait — a country under Iranian missile attack since February 28 — are finding themselves unable to leave. Kuwait’s airspace is closed, and the overland route runs through Saudi Arabia. The catch? Crossing that border requires an exit permit issued by your employer. Kuwait introduced this requirement last July: a digital form, processed by app, mostly routine.
One American living there for over a decade called it, simply, “a hostage system.”
The exit permit is a cousin of the kafala, the Gulf’s longstanding sponsorship model that ties a migrant worker’s legal residency to their employer. Under kafala, your boss holds your visa. Leaving a job without permission can mean losing your right to be in the country at all. The system was designed to give employers certainty over labor they recruited at significant cost.
In practice, it created conditions for endemic wage theft, passport confiscation, and exploitation documented extensively and embarrassingly by human rights groups and Western governments alike.
Why is this interesting?
What makes Kuwait’s move so striking is that the rest of the Gulf has spent the last five years moving decisively in the opposite direction — and for reasons that have nothing to do with conscience.
Qatar, under the sustained commercial pressure of World Cup scrutiny, eliminated exit permit requirements for most workers in 2020. The UAE has significantly loosened job-change restrictions, and Bahrain has done the same. These were pragmatic, strategic pivots by governments that understood something important: if you want to attract the global professional class — the fund managers, the architects, the regional directors choosing between Dubai and Singapore — you cannot run a labor system that treats people as controlled assets.
Kuwait went the other direction. The emir dissolved parliament in May 2024, and embarked on what the government framed as a regulatory overhaul. The exit permit rule followed in July 2025. The stated rationale — protecting employers and employees, reducing “violations associated with leaving without prior notice” — is the kind of language that sounds reasonable in a conference room yet catastrophic in a crisis. It imagines a world where departures are planned, paperwork is orderly, and no one is trying to flee a missile strike.
The flaw is almost poignant in its mundanity. Exit permits are a peacetime instrument for managing labor arbitrage. No one thought: what happens when a worker needs to leave and their employer is unreachable, uncooperative, or simply slow? The system wasn’t built for emergencies, it was built for normal times.
Yet Kuwait missed the memo, and now it owns the consequences: a bureaucratic instrument designed to keep workers from leaving jobs is keeping workers from leaving a war zone. The exit permit is trapping people because no one in a bureaucracy thought hard enough about what it actually was. (CJN)