Why the Gulf-Central Asia labor corridor is stuck, despite four years of relationship-building

Gulf states have spent four years signing labor agreements with Central Asia, but the workforce has hardly budged. The corridor has the ingredients — a young, increasingly skilled Central Asian workforce, real Gulf demand, and now an IMF endorsement — and it is stuck on price. Central Asian governments put the bar for skilled workers at roughly USD 2.5-3.0k a month, well above what the Gulf pays most of its migrant workforce, and those workers have somewhere else to go. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is training Uzbek engineers and health workers while its own nationalization quotas shrink the foreign-held share of those exact jobs.

A new IMF paper argues the two regions have significant room to deepen trade and investment ties — and labor is part of the picture. “The paper highlights the significant potential for scaling up investment and trade flows between countries of the two regions,” an IMF spokesperson tells EnterpriseAM. “The GCC countries, with their high demand for labor, represent a potential destination for [Caucasus and Central Asian, or CCA] workers,” the spokesperson says.

Nobody, on either side, publishes a figure for how many Central Asians are working in the Gulf today. “Although the UN data do not cover migration between GCC and CCA, mobility between the two regions is likely very limited at present. Greater labor mobility between the GCC and the CCA could deliver mutual benefits, including remittances,” the IMF spokesperson tells us. But with or without the data, the corridor is being built out.

MoUs are multiplying, but migration isn’t

Four years of agreements: Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan signed a foundational employment-cooperation agreement in August 2022, as Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev visited Riyadh. Qatar followed with a “new stage” labor agreement with Uzbekistan in November 2025; Saudi Arabia deepened its own Uzbek partnership this past May, adding qualification exams and training programs in medicine, construction, tourism, and engineering.

Uzbekistan has signed 48 labor-migration agreements with 23 countries in total — 18 of them in 2025-26 — and has flagged the UAE (hospitality, tourism, aviation, logistics) and Saudi Arabia (construction, technical trades, mid-level healthcare) as priority destinations.

But even with all of these labor-migration agreements and the corridor to the Gulf opening up, Russia is still the preferred market for CCA laborers. Uzbekistan’s central bank counted over 1.3 mn Uzbeks working in Russia on official work patents in 1Q 2026, up 11.6% y-o-y — a figure migration researchers say can run closer to 2 mn in peak season. No equivalent count exists for the Gulf side.

“People in Central Asia would prefer the huge market in Russia,” Zuhra Halimova, senior advisor at Almaty-based think tank CAPS Unlock, tells EnterpriseAM. “They don’t need a visa and they don’t need to know English. They feel native in that environment.”

The money backs that up. Remittances from Russia make up close to half of Tajikistan’s GDP and roughly a quarter of Kyrgyzstan’s, according to World Bank data, placing both countries among the highest remittance-dependency ratios anywhere. “When you look at the numbers of remittances coming from Russia to Central Asia, particularly to Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, we are talking about very large amounts of money,” Halimova says.

The Gulf is a newer proposition, competing against options CCA workers already know well — Europe, South Korea, Japan. Kazakhstan joined South Korea’s EPS guest-worker program as part of the same diversification drive.

A different worker, at a different price

The workers the Gulf is recruiting from Central Asia look nothing like the labor force the region built its migration system on. The GCC’s roughly 30 mn-strong migrant workforce is overwhelmingly low-wage and blue-collar, drawn mainly from South and Southeast Asia — a corridor moving roughly 3.4 mn workers into the Gulf every year.

Central Asians heading to the Gulf, Halimova says, are mostly skilled professionals — banking, fintech, IT, construction, engineering, services. Gulf employers are targeting the same tier: Saudi Arabia is recruiting Uzbek healthcare workers, and Qatar Airways is chasing roughly 1.6k Uzbek specialists.

Saudi Arabia is also shrinking those same jobs. While it trains Uzbek engineers, health workers and tourism staff for its labor market, the Kingdom’s Saudization drive is squeezing foreign headcount in those same job categories. Engineering firms employing five or more accredited engineers must now hit a 30% Saudi-national quota. Tourism roles face a phased localization mandate reaching 40% from 22 June 2026. An Uzbek worker trained for a specific Saudi hospital or hotel role is being prepared for a market that is shrinking the foreign-held share of that exact job.

And skilled labor doesn’t come cheap. “It’s not going to be cheap labor coming from Central Asia,” Halimova says. Central Asian governments expect Gulf salaries to clear roughly USD 2.5k-3.0k a month before migration makes sense for skilled workers. “There is no need to actually go to the Middle East if the paycheck would be less than in Central Asia,” she argues.

As Central Asian economies build out their own tech and services sectors, the calculus cuts both ways: “There is some concern that the brain will be leaving Central Asia,” she says, pointing to rising domestic demand for digital and AI skills.

Gulf wages have a problem — they’re “very low,” S. Irudaya Rajan, founder and chair of the International Institute of Migration and Development, tells us. “If you are talking about USD 300-400, what are the wages we are talking about?”

Wage competition has already eroded migrant bargaining power in the Gulf’s larger, established sending corridors, Rajan says. “If you want to bargain USD 100 extra from the employer, they may say, ‘I will get somebody from Nepal or somebody from Bangladesh.’” Leverage, in his view, only exists where an employer can’t easily replace the worker. “If I lose her, this is not good for my company. So I may be ready to pay more,” he says. “That is where you have to work out.”

For Central Asia, that means building the route into the Gulf around where its workers hold a genuine wage or skills edge, rather than around volume.

Pricing vs. structural risks

Higher pay doesn’t insulate skilled migrants from the Gulf’s structural labor risks, warns Mustafa Qadri, founder and CEO of London-based labor-rights organization Equidem. “The kafala foreign employment system remains a risk for so-called high-skill and high-wage migrant workers because of the power imbalance between the sponsor and the worker,” he tells EnterpriseAM.

Equidem has documented cases of senior executives and managers barred from leaving their employer or the country, Qadri says. Skilled workers may have more room to fight back — “these workers may be more empowered or, due to their higher levels of education, have a greater ability to challenge their sponsor through the labor justice system” — but the structure underneath doesn’t change. Skilled foreign workers also generally lack a path to permanent residency or naturalization, have no industry associations to represent them in a dispute, and often answer to sponsors with direct or indirect ties to government officials who can tilt how a dispute gets resolved, per Qadri.

“For better paid workers the Gulf can appear to be a clean, modern and sophisticated labor market, but it remains one with a high risk of forced labor for all foreign workers regardless of the value or skill-level of their job,” Qadri says.

The missing piece

Rajan wants better matching before more agreements. “Today everybody talks, unfortunately, without evidence,” he says. Governments need a systematic read on what Gulf employers actually want and where Central Asian economies can supply it. “There should be a systematic understanding of the Gulf. What they want, we don’t know … We are all talking.”

His prescription is sector-specific labor strategies rather than one undifferentiated pool: “Central Asian countries have to decide what they can specialize in. You have to create your own package.”

Halimova makes the same case for training, pointing to South Korea’s model of building skills-and-language centers in the worker’s home country before departure. “If Saudi Arabia needs a particular skill, they can set up a skills center in Central Asia with some Arabic and English,” she says — training that could extend to labor law and workplace conditions, closing the gap Qadri’s findings point to.

Make the corridor worth choosing

The Gulf is competing for workers from multiple origins; Central Asian workers are choosing between multiple destinations. “For GCC, Central Asia is basically a new discovery as an opportunity to invest,” Halimova says.

Regional conflict isn’t a future risk to price in — it’s already slowing the pipeline. “These wars in the Middle East are actually stopping this whole process because people are not very sure whether they have to go,” Halimova says.

Central Asian workers already know the risks of Russia’s warzone economy; what they don’t know is what happens to them if a Gulf employer or country turns unstable mid-contract. “It’s all about safety,” she says. “Whenever the GCC countries in the Middle East will be safe enough, we can think about rapid growth.”

Pay and benefits will decide it too. “If the opportunities are there and they give good benefits like a good salary, medical ins., housing and so on, many more people would think about traveling and settling there to work long term,” she says.

Rajan’s test for the corridor is simple: “Right place, right skill, and right salary.” The Gulf has named the places and the skills. It has not yet met the salary — and Saudi quotas and a volatile neighborhood are pulling in the other direction.