"A Deadly Fire Exposes the Plight of Low-Paid Migrants in Wealthy Kuwait,"

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Mr. Kumar and his roommates were all construction workers subcontracted on projects for Kuwait’s state oil firm and refining company, and they said they could afford to pay only about $325 in rent between the four of them. Because a whole apartment would cost more than twice that amount, they were resigned to finding themselves another room to share, with no guarantee that it would be any safer or more comfortable than their old home.

The high death toll from the fire in June — which engulfed a seven-story building where nearly 200 migrant workers lived — shocked people across Kuwait. In the weeks after the tragedy, it spurred an unusually public reckoning over unsafe housing for migrant workers, as inspectors fanned out to issue building code violations.

But that response stopped short of addressing the structural issues that afflict migrant workers in Kuwait and other Gulf countries, human rights activists say. In some cases, the government’s reaction punished the migrants themselves — evicting them from their homes and leaving them in fear of deportation. After the fire, Kuwait’s Interior Ministry said an unspecified number of visa violators in workers’ housing had been arrested.

“It’s a perfect tragic example of how migrant workers are noticed only when there is some kind of catastrophe,” said James Lynch, a director of FairSquare, a London-based research group that investigates rights abuses. “Nobody was thinking about worker housing in Kuwait until this happened — until it made the government look really bad.”...

Kuwait’s Public Authority for Manpower, which oversees labor affairs, did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Kuwait Oil Company or Kuwait National Petroleum Company — the companies that Mr. Kumar and his roommates said they worked for, via third-party contractors.

After the fire, The New York Times interviewed 18 migrant workers in Kuwait about their living conditions; many spoke on the condition of partial anonymity because they feared retribution.

Several of them described Kuwaiti authorities cracking down on building code violations, ordering people to leave their homes with minimal notice...

Employers in Kuwait are obligated to provide accommodations, but many of the workers said they had been left to find their own. Rashid and Rahmat, Pakistani workers who declined to give their last names, described going from building to building on foot to ask about vacancies. The biggest struggle, they said, is finding a space they can afford...