LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
"My Willing Complicity In “Human Rights Abuse”" by AlphaAndOmega
16 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: What is the significance of AI in proofreading and editing?
My Willing Complicity in Human Rights Abuse by Alpha and Omega Published on March 15, 2026 Note on AI usage As is my norm, I use LLMs for proofreading, editing, feedback and research purposes. This essay started off as an entirely human written draft and went through multiple cycles of iteration.
The primary additions were citations, and I have done my best to personally verify every link and claim. All other observations are entirely autobiographical, albeit written in retrospect. If anyone insists, I can share the original and intermediate forms, though my approach to version control is lacking. It's there if you really want it.
If you want to map the trajectory of my medical career, you will need a large piece of paper, a pen, and a high tolerance for Brownian motion. It has been tortuous, albeit not quite to the point of varicosity. Why, for instance, did I spend several months in 2023 working as a GP at a Qatari visa centre in India?
Mostly because my girlfriend at the time found a job listing that seemed to pay above market rate and because I needed money for take-out. I am a simple creature with even simpler needs. I require shelter, internet access, and enough disposable income to ensure a steady influx of complex carbohydrates and the various types of vitamin B. For all practical purposes, this means biryani.
Why did a foreign branch of the Qatari Immigration Department require several doctors? Primarily, to process the enormous number of would-be Indian laborers who wished to take up jobs there. I would say they were 99% of the caseload, low-skilled laborers working in construction, as domestic servants, as chauffeurs or truck drivers.
There were the odd handful of students, or higher-skilled workers, but so few of them that I could still count them on my fingers even after several hundreds of hours of work. Our job was to perform a quick medical examination and assess fitness for work. Odd chest sounds or a weird cough. Exclude tuberculosis. Weird rashes or bumps.
The absolute last thing Qatari urban planners wanted was an outbreak of chickenpox or fungal infections tearing through a high-density labour dormitory. Could the applicant see and hear well enough to avoid being crushed by heavy machinery or to avoid crushing others when operating heavy machinery? Were they carrying HIV?
It was our job to exclude these possibilities before they got there in the first place. Otherwise, the government wasn't particularly picky, a warm body with mostly functional muscles and ligaments would suffice. This required less cognitive effort than standard GP or family medicine. The causal arrow of the doctor-patient interaction was reversed.
These people weren't coming to us because they were sick and seeking healing. They were coming to us because they needed to prove they weren't sick enough to pose a public health hazard or suffer a catastrophic workplace failure. We were able to provide some actual medical care.
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Chapter 2: Why did the narrator work as a GP at a Qatari visa center in India?
Were we really that different, them and I? At that exact moment in my life, I was furiously studying for the exams that would allow me to move to the UK and work in the NHS. We were both engaged in geographic arbitrage.
We were both looking at the map of the global economy, identifying zones of massive capital accumulation, and jumping through burning bureaucratic hoops to transport our human capital there to capture the wage premium. Nobody really calls an Indian doctor moving to the UK a smigrant worker, but that is exactly what I am right now.
The difference between me and the guy applying to drive forklifts in Doha is quantitative, not qualitative. I could well understand the reasons why someone might leave their friends and family behind, go to a distant land across an ocean and then work long hours in suboptimal conditions, but I wanted to hear that for myself. As I expected, the main reason was the incredibly attractive pay.
If I'm being honest, the main reason I moved to the UK was the money too. Incredibly attractive. I imagine you thinking, perhaps recalling that by First World standards their salary was grossly lacking. To the point of regular accusation that the Qataris and other Middle Eastern petrostates are exploitative, preying on their workers. First World standards are not Third World standards.
This is where Western intuition about labour often misfires, stumbling into a sort of well-intentioned but suffocating paternalism. The argument generally goes. This job involves intense heat, long hours, and low pay relative to Western minimum wages. Therefore, it is inherently exploitative, and anyone taking it must be a victim of coercion or deception.
This completely ignores the economic principle of revealed preferences. The idea that you can tell what a person actually values by observing what they choose to do under constraint. Western pundits sit in climate-controlled pods and declare that nobody should ever have to work in 40-degree heat for $300 a month.
But for someone whose alternative is working in 40-degree heat in Bihar for $30 a month with no social safety net, banning Qatari labor practices doesn't save them. It just destroys their highest expected value option. You cannot legislate away grinding poverty and resource constraints.
The economic case for Gulf migration from South Asia is almost embarrassingly strong when you actually look at it. India received roughly $120 billion in remittances in 2023, making it the world's largest recipient, with Gulf states still accounting for a very large share, though the RBI's own survey data show that advanced economies now contribute more than half of India's remittances.
For certain origin states, Kerala being the clearest case, alongside Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, remittance income is not a rounding error in household economics. It is the household economy. the man sending money home from Doha is participating in a system that has done more for South Asian poverty alleviation than most bilateral aid programmes combined.
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Chapter 3: What was the primary role of doctors at the Qatari visa center?
Now they're drying up, and I'm slightly embarrassed for being maudlin. I am rarely given to sentiment, and I hope you will forgive me for this momentary lapse. I asked him how well the job paid. Well enough to be worth it, he told me. He quoted a figure that was not very far from my then monthly salary of 76,000 Indian rupees, about 820 dollars today.
Whatever he made there, I noted that I had made about the same while working as an actual doctor in India in earlier jobs, as I've said, this gig paid well, better than previous jobs I'd had and many I had later. He expected a decent bump, personal drivers seemed to be paid slightly better than commercial operators.
I do not know if he was being hired by a well-off individual directly or through an agency. Probably the latter, if I had to guess, less hassle that way. I asked him if he had ever worked similar roles in India. He said he had. He had made a tenth the money, in conditions far worse than what he would face in Qatar.
He, like many other people I interviewed, viewed the life you have the luxury of considering inhumane and unpalatable, and deemed it a strict improvement to the status quo. He was eager to be back. He was saddened that his son would continue growing up in his absence, but he was optimistic that the boy would understand why his father did what he had to do.
One of the reasons this struck me so hard then, as it continues to do now, is that my own father had done much the same. I will beat myself with a rusty stick before I claim he was an absentee dad, but he was busy, only able to give his kids less time than he would have liked because he was busy working himself ragged to ensure our material prosperity.
I love him, and hope this man's son, now probably in middle school, will also understand. I do not have to go back more than a single generation before hitting ancestors who were also rural peasants, albeit with more and better land than could be found in an impoverished corner of Bihar.
By moving to the Middle East, he was engaged in arbitrage that allowed him to make a salary comparable to the doctor seeing him in India. I look at how much more I make after working in the NHS and see a similar bump. I just have the luxury of capturing my wage premium inside a climate-controlled hospital, sleeping in a comfortable bed, and making enough money to fly home on holidays.
I try to be grateful for the privilege. I try to give the hedonic treadmill a good kick when it has the temerity to make me feel too bad for myself. There are many other reasons that people decry the kafala system other than the perceived poor pay and working conditions.
The illegal seizure of passports, employer permission required to switch jobs, accusations of physical abuse and violence are all well documented, though the link to the 2020 Reuters article claims the system was overhauled and effectively dismantled. I make no firm claims on actual frequency. I have seen nothing with my own two eyes.
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