King’s Gambit
On 20 March, a Bangladeshi migrant working at a small eatery in the coastal Jordanian city of Aqaba complained to me about how little the jobs there paid, leaving “hardly anything to send home,” even as he conceded that “at home, I might not even get a job.” It was a sentiment echoed by not only the majority of migrant workers I spoke to—mostly Palestinians, Syrians, South Asians, Filipinos and Egyptians—but by the Jordanians themselves. There was palpable disappointment in the air because of the lack of jobs and meagre salaries. The government holds an ongoing refugee crisis partially responsible for the domestic situation, but the residents of Jordan no longer buy this explanation.
During an interview at the World Economic Forum, on 24
