In late April 2025, the Jordanian Ministry of Labour announced that the government had deported over 3,000 foreign workers for violating labour laws in the country. This followed a wave of inspections targeting non-citizens working without permits in sectors such as domestic work, garment production, agriculture and construction.
The inspection campaign continues unabated. Exact numbers are difficult to establish, but based on our research, it is safe to assume that it has forced thousands of people out of work. Many businesses have closed.
The Bangladeshi owner of one unlicensed clothing workshop in Ad-Dhulayl, a town in northeast Jordan, recounted how he and other business owners were scared into temporarily shutting down earlier this year, after the Ministry of Labour announced it would fine companies 800 JOD (£833) per informal worker caught by inspectors.
From the main market street, he pointed out the now empty houses where Yemeni refugees and Egyptian migrants had lived before being forcibly deported. “We have seen waves of inspections before, but never of this duration and intensity,” he said. “It seems that this time they are serious about wanting all foreign workers out of the country.”
These raids didn’t come entirely out of the blue. In late 2024, the Ministries of Labour and Interior, together with the Public Security Directorate, stepped up efforts to regularise Jordan’s foreign workforce, and to enforce rules requiring employers to hire a minimum quota of Jordanian workers.
The campaign against informal work that followed has been marked by its punitive rhetoric, turning migrant workers into scapegoats for an unemployment rate of over 21% and an increasingly punishing cost of living. These include male workers from Egypt and predominantly female workers from South Asia and East Africa who initially entered Jordan legally as labour migrants, but became ‘irregular workers’ once they overstayed their work and residency permits.
Officially, refugees are not featuring in the rhetoric of this campaign. Ostensibly it only targets informal migrant workers. But in practice, many people who originally came to Jordan for protection are also falling into its net. This new campaign has made their lives more precarious than they already were.
A tenth of Jordan’s population are precarious refugees
Jordan hosts over 500,000 registered refugees, over 90% of whom are from Syria. Several thousand refugees from Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and other East African countries also live in the country. Real refugee population figures are likely to be much higher, as registration procedures by UNHCR (the UN refugee agency) have been suspended since 2019.
Jordan is additionally home to 2.5 million Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA, and many more who are unregistered. These fall into numerous different categories with differentiated access to the Jordanian labour market. Amongst them are Palestinians who have obtained Jordanian nationality (the majority); ex-Gazans, whose families fled after 1967 and remain stateless; and those who were living in Syria but fled to Jordan after the Syrian Civil War began in 2011.
Overall, non-citizen refugees likely make up just under 10% of Jordan’s population. Different sets of regulations control the right to work for each refugee group – resulting in confusing and discriminatory practices and exacerbating legal and social precarity. These nationality and ethnicity-based policies, which often change erratically, have turned refugee communities into a workforce that is easily exploited and readily deportable.
Exceptions for Syrians eroded
Syrians have seen their situation change dramatically over the past year. The current crackdown on migrant workers has been accompanied by the systematic removal of privileges for Syrian refugees working in Jordan. This signals the unravelling of the Jordan Compact, a major policy initiative from 2016 that sought to formally integrate Syrian refugees into the Jordanian labour market.
Hailed as a major policy innovation in managing refugees and acknowledging their labour during a protracted displacement, the compact created a series of regulatory exceptions that facilitated the formalisation of Syrian labour in certain sectors. This included low-cost work permits; the introduction of a freelance permit; exemptions from, or significant reductions to, social security contributions; and the allowance for some Syrians with work permits to continue receiving humanitarian assistance. These changes made it possible for significant numbers of Syrians to regularise their work in agriculture, construction, services and manufacturing.
Such measures were rewarded with a revised trade agreement between Jordan and the EU that promised to increase Jordan’s industrial exports. Numerous donor-funded projects and programmes geared towards encouraging Syrian labour market participation also appeared in the wake of the compact. These included cash for work projects, job matching programmes and financial inclusion initiatives.
We don't apply for permits anymore because we have become afraid of scams and accumulating fees
But even at the height of enthusiasm, there was a major discrepancy between what the compact promised and its actual effects. The numbers of Syrians who permanently formalised their work remained limited. Improvements to working conditions and wage levels were modest and most Syrians continued to work informally, if they were able to work at all. Regular, high-skilled jobs remained out of reach. Nevertheless, the policy attention that came with the Jordan Compact did have one major effect: it made many Syrians feel safe from deportation and police harassment, regardless of their work status.
It wasn’t to last. New crises in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza began to draw international funding and attention. Most international organisations reduced and then eventually removed their livelihoods programming in Jordan, which were previously the most-well funded part of the humanitarian response to Syrian displacement.
National policy language also changed. The Jordanian government began to revise the core regulations that had facilitated formalisation of Syrian labour. Even before the ousting of Syria’s former president, Bashar al-Assad, in December 2024, Jordanian ministers had begun to openly call for Syrian returns.
Then, in early 2025, the Trump administration cut $3bn of funding allocated to USAID, of which Jordan was the third-largest recipient. This was the final nail in the coffin. Once the Syrians’ presence no longer brought in substantial international funding, it became clear that Jordan saw little benefit from the continued presence of Syrian refugees.
Syrians with work permits were asked to pay full instead of reduced social security contributions. Work permit fees were raised to unaffordable levels. And work permit holders were asked to retroactively pay for both. This made Syrians increasingly wary of the work permits regime, trapping some of those who had formalised their work in a cycle of debt.
One Syrian woman living in Amman told us in a group discussion that, “We didn’t know [it] would become a burden, like taking a loan from a bank with accumulating interest.” Another added: “We don't apply for permits anymore because we have become afraid of scams and accumulating fees”.
Increased deportations for other refugee populations
Other refugees and asylum seekers – those from Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, the ex-Gazans and others – were excluded from the Jordan Compact. Generally, these refugees are barred from formally entering the Jordanian labour market. They are instead constrained to low-wage, precarious sectors not covered by protections in the Jordanian Labour Code. Their exclusion from the compact has also meant that work permit fees for them are prohibitively expensive, with the only alternative being to seek out a local sponsor.
In 2019, the Jordanian government ordered UNHCR to suspend its registration processes for all non-Syrian asylum seekers, plunging newly arrived refugee communities into further limbo and precarity. In the years following, and in the wake of the Covid-19 health crisis, the Ministries of Labor and Interior intensified their targeting of non-Syrians (especially Sudanese and Yemenis) in workplace inspections.
A particular challenge for many of these groups is the requirement that non-Syrian refugees and asylum seekers who wish to apply for work permits must renounce their international protection application with UNHCR, in line with long-standing government policy. This creates a dilemma. Applying for a work permit can provide a minimal level of protection, including Jordanian residency. However, remaining registered with UNHCR means refugees can keep their names on the list for third-country resettlement – which many see as their only way out of poverty and precarity.
Neither option is easily obtained. Since 2020, applying for both statuses simultaneously can also put a person at risk of being detained or even deported, if UNHCR did not intervene to prevent it. In the past, authorities generally turned a blind eye to refugees holding both statuses. But now the message is clear: these groups are no longer welcome in the country.
While Syrians have been subject to dramatic changes in their status since mid-2024, the experience of many non-Syrian refugees has been marked by precarity, lack of protection, and ongoing illegalisation for considerably longer.
A labour market divided on nationality lines
Even though refugees in Jordan fall into several different categories, all are affected by the legal limbo imposed on them by a country that is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention. In addition to this, both refugees and migrants are disadvantaged by regulations introduced since the late 1980s to prioritise Jordanians on the labour market. They must obtain work permits and are restricted to sectors that are unpopular among Jordanians, primarily agriculture, construction, food services, manufacturing, cleaning, and domestic care.
Jordan also has a memorandum of understanding with the UNHCR outlining basic protections for persons displaced to Jordan, such as the principle of non-refoulement. Yet any specifications around the right to work are deliberately vague and change frequently. This pushes protection seekers to work in the informal sector, where social protection is almost non-existent and claiming even basic worker rights is inconceivable.
A number of exceptions to these rules have – when politically convenient – allowed non-nationals selected labour market access. The Jordan Compact, which brought in significant international funding, is one such example.
Ex-Gazans also have a special status in the Jordanian labour market given their significant demographic weight and their contentious geopolitical status as a stateless refugee population whose right to return underpins the Palestinian struggle for liberation. While they are banned from accessing public sector employment, they did not need a work permit to access work in private sector occupations open to foreigners, including some technical or vocational professions, until 2016. This clearly set them apart from other non-Palestinian refugees.
But since the Jordan Compact was established, which expressly prioritised Syrian workers, ex-Gazans have been required to obtain work permits for all private sector employment. This has created insurmountable procedural and financial challenges for most, increasing already skyrocketing unemployment rates further and pushing more people into the informal sector. In contrast to Palestinian refugees with Jordanian citizenship, ex-Gazans also face legal restrictions complicating access to education and diverse professions, from licenses required to work as taxi drivers to self-employment in white-collar professions.
The powerful combination of legal precarity and racist attitudes results in a racially segmented labour market
For refugees from East Africa, including those from Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, and from Yemen, formalising work through gaining permits is often not an option. This is either because of high costs and red tape, or due to fears that it could compromise their prospects for resettlement to a third country, where they might access better long-term opportunities.
As a result, these refugees primarily occupy informal jobs as day-wage labourers in the cleaning and construction sectors. Especially Sudanese women also work in beauty centres in Amman, where they are paid by the hour, depending on demand. For each service performed, a percentage of their pay is taken by the business owner, leaving them with only a small portion of the earnings. This situation has pushed some, like Aziza – a Sudanese woman – to work independently from home to avoid such forms of exploitation. As she explains:
After working in several beauty salons in the Jordanian capital as a henna artist – since few Jordanian women know how to do it – I decided to work independently from home or visit clients around the city. I’ve built a real network of Jordanian women, and together with other Sudanese friends, we are often invited to weddings or local celebrations to offer our henna designs.
Racism and recruitment
Recruitment of foreign workers is also restricted by racist attitudes. A 25-year-old Sudanese man told us how he was systematically hidden at his workplace:
I was working in a restaurant in a fancy neighbourhood in Amman. My manager never allowed me into the main dining area, to avoid any contact with customers. Instead, I was kept in the back of the restaurant, doing the dishes. He didn’t want me to be seen by the customers because of my skin colour, which here, in Jordan, is often associated with dirtiness.
The powerful combination of legal precarity and racist attitudes results in a racially segmented labour market. This pushes different refugee groups into specific niches and extracts as much labour from them as possible for as little cost, making upward social mobility extremely challenging.
As refugees’ access to the labour market is so restricted, informal channels within the community are crucial for finding jobs. People replace one another at work and pass on contacts to help each other out. This reinforces the racialised segmentation of the labour market.
Racially segmented labour markets are extremely resistant to being reconfigured. The false assumption that doing so is easy underpins many failed social engineering experiments, including the Jordan Compact. Stakeholders imagined achieving a win-win solution by replacing predominantly South-Asian migrant workers with Syrian refugees. A revised preferential trade agreement between Jordan and the European Union in 2016, which promised tariff reductions to garment producers who staffed more than 25% of a production line with Syrian refugees, was signed to induce employers to action.
But the Jordan Compact’s reductive attempt to transform the ‘refugee crisis’ into an economic opportunity failed to bear fruit, even in the garment sector where preferential trading terms sought to sweeten the pot. This is because the compact’s drafters failed to adequately consider all the mundane reasons employers, migrants and even refugees themselves would resist this imposition from above.
Functioning under a 2001 Jordan-US Free Trade Agreement (JOFTA), the garment industry is clustered in industrial zones across Jordan and dominated by multinational clothing producers headquartered in Southeast Asia. The sector produces clothing for export to the US, and is mainly staffed by migrant workers who live and work in factory compounds as part of a hyper-intensive production regime.
Recruitment campaigns targeting Syrian refugee women were organised and bus transport was provided. But recruitment remained low, and many of the Syrians who did sign up to work in the factories quit their jobs soon after. They had many reasons for doing this, including long commuting times, care duties, and salaries below what their families required.
Meanwhile, employers also proved largely uninterested in the compact’s designs. In relation to the seemingly always available South-Asian workers, they deemed Syrians as much less productive and too committed to their social and family lives to willingly replace one group with the other.
Nine years on, the few Syrian women still found in the garment factories are often the main breadwinners in their families. They only stay until they succeed in finding more attractive work in the informal economy. Meanwhile, two-thirds of the garment factory workforce continue to be made up of migrant workers – with a 25% quota remaining for Jordanian workers.
Most of the migrant workers are women recruited on three-year contracts from across South Asia, with small numbers of Palestinians from Gaza and Yemeni refugees also among the workforce. Over recent months, the punitive campaign against informal workers has disproportionately targeted these non-citizen refugee workers, who are often informally employed in the clothing factories via subcontracted cleaning or security companies.
The impact of insecurity
From the outset, the campaign against informal work singled out particular urban districts and the dense residential areas surrounding industrial zones where most migrants and refugees live and work.
Inspections particularly targeted migrant businesses or small-scale workshops employing foreign workers. In a largely informal market area near a large cluster of such workshops in northeast Amman, inspections have been carried out day and night. This increasing crackdown has spread alarm among the diverse refugee and migrant populations employed in the local garment workshops and in the restaurants and shops catering to the foreign workers in the area.
Intensified inspections and searches have prompted many refugees to restrict their movement for fear of being stopped, searched and questioned. Refugees from East Africa have reported being especially cautious, due to their experience of being disproportionately targeted in police searches and workplace inspections even before the intensified crackdown began earlier this year.
Ikhtyar, a Yemeni woman in her thirties who has become a community leader, spoke about how these campaigns have affected Yemeni refugees and asylum seekers:
The Yemeni community was hit particularly hard by the regularisation campaign, because some of its members don’t have any UNHCR documents. But even those who do hold UNHCR papers were affected. As arrests of Yemeni men and women increased, people grew more frightened and anxious about being deported to Yemen, especially in light of the country’s fragile situation within the broader regional context.
Some people stopped working altogether, went into debt just to survive, and remained confined to their homes, avoiding any movement around the city. Families have been separated as a result of this campaign. In some cases, a father or mother was arrested at work, and after prison, deportation was the only outcome. I know of families who remain separated because of the deportation campaign until now.
For Syrian refugees, dramatic increases in work permit fees have also pushed many into precarious and undocumented work. While some employers offer to split work permit fees with their employees, others give Syrians a less sympathetic choice: either pay the fees in full – by deducting a considerable portion of their monthly wages – or to substitute them with other, cheaper migrant workers.
A Syrian mother of three who has worked in a garment factory for over seven years told us that she is considering returning to her hometown in Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus, for the very first time. “I have no illusions that the situation [in Syria] will be extremely difficult,” she said. “But for the first time since I fled to Jordan in 2013, I don’t feel welcome here anymore. In the factory, even in the supermarket, Jordanians ask me when I will return home.”
Visibly shaken, she added: “The increase in permit fees means no one wants us Syrian workers anymore. Even in the factory, where I was always appreciated for my sewing skills, I no longer trust they will prolong my contract.”
For the majority of Syrians who never formalised their work in the first place, jobs are now even harder to come by. Employers are closing their doors to informal workers due to fears of being penalised with hefty fines.
Solidarity in times of uncertainty
On 29 May 2025, the Ministry of Labour announced that all further recruitment of foreign workers was suspended with immediate effect and that campaigns targeting irregular workers would continue.
Behind the scenes, however, negotiations have been held with employers across sectors relying on foreign workers to secure some exceptions and guarantee the continued availability of cheap, non-citizen labour. That’s the underlying irony. While the outcome of these talks remains unclear, what can be said for certain is that the crackdown, punitive as it is, will not solve Jordan’s unemployment crisis. Migrants might get deported. But as before, the government has no plan for how to entice Jordanian nationals to replace foreign workers in low-wage sectors. This means migrants will likely return.
At the same time, prospects for dignified work and life for refugees in Jordan grow ever bleaker. Support from international aid organisations has reduced drastically, with cash aid or food vouchers now much rarer to find. While it’s inevitable that humanitarian agencies feel compelled to shift resources on to the next crisis or policy priority, it leaves those who rely on their interventions stranded.
This cliff edge is exacerbated by the hostile policies of the host government, which in Jordan’s case has made no efforts to support a more permanent arrangement. In effect, growing numbers of refugees – now including Syrians – are being pushed into informality or return, without the layer of protection previously guaranteed by way of international attention.
Facing the imminent threat of deportation, other families chose to spare themselves the pain of arrest, imprisonment and deportation, and decided to return to Yemen
In response, asylum seekers, refugees and migrant workers are drawing on their diverse networks to navigate this complex and shifting terrain. Those with international or local business connections remain comparably safe, as these can help people endure or find creative solutions to their status issues. Information sharing, solidarity networks, and mutual aid are the only hope for refugees and migrant workers who have none of these informal protections.
Many Syrian families have begun to strengthen their links back home in the aftermath of regime change and in response to the crackdowns. In several cases, those who still have a job in Jordan have chosen to remain in the country, while the rest of the family returns to Syria to begin reconstruction efforts – aided by a lower cost of living in Syria and money transfers from Jordan.
In other refugee communities, community solidarity initiatives were set up to help overcome the crisis situation. Ikhtyar, the Yemeni female community leader, explained to us: “Some families decided to stop working temporarily, thinking the campaign would last only a month or two, and moved in with other families to share food and ease the financial burden of rent.”
She added: “Facing the imminent threat of deportation, other families chose to spare themselves the pain of arrest, imprisonment and deportation, and decided to return to Yemen. Yemenis then launched initiatives to raise money and help families pay for their plane tickets back to Yemen.”
While community solidarity, and solidarity between different refugee and migrant groups, remain crucial sources of support, the increasingly insurmountable restrictions to work and livelihood-making in Jordan mean that often there is little that can be done except support refugees’ return to uncertainty or outright unsafety in their home countries.
Explore the series
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Isabel Ruiz - Displacement from Venezuela taught me that class has no borders
Erick Moreno Superlano - How Ukrainian refugees hit a glass ceiling working in Poland
Jan Bazyli Klakla - Exploitation embedded in the business model of refugee support
Georgina Ramsay - Refugees caught in Jordan’s campaign against informal work
Solenn Almajali, Katharina Grüneisl and Katharina Lenner - Kurds increasingly deported after Japan closes ‘loophole’ law
Chiaki Tsuchida - Refugees in Brazil: Marginalised despite legal protections
Angelo Martins Junior - Brazil refugees: Forming collective resistance where policy fails
Clarissa Paiva, Beatrice Jemeli Chelimo and Mariana Zawadi Kitenge Mukuna - Sudanese in Uganda: ‘Life didn’t stop with the war’
Haidar Abdalla Adam Ahmed - The world doesn't care about Sudan. It's up to us to rebuild
Hind Taha - Neither student nor worker: how Rohingya youth rebuild in exile
Abel Vijayakumar - ‘No way out’: the closing spaces for Rohingya livelihoods
Kyaw Thura
Katharina Grueneisl is a geographer and ethnographer who has researched labour in the global clothing value chain, from second-hand clothes markets in Tunisia to factories for new clothing in Jordan. She is a Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham and an affiliated researcher at the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain.
Katharina Lenner is a lecturer at the University of Bath whose work focuses on labour, (forced) migration and social protection across the Middle East and Europe. She has conducted extensive research on the effects of formalisation initiatives on precarious workers, particularly Syrian refugees in Jordan.
Solenn Almajali is an anthropologist and activist for migrants’ rights in Jordan. Her research focuses on racialisation, mixed-race identities, belonging, and sociability in the context of forced migration. Her current work particularly focuses on Yemeni migrations and mixed ethnicities between the Horn of Africa and Yemen.
