The kafala (sponsorship) system ties migrant domestic workers’ legal status directly to their employer in Gulf Cooperation Council countries, removing the ability to change jobs or return home without sponsor permission. Human Rights Watch’s Oman investigation, based on interviews with 59 migrant domestic workers, found that almost all had their passports confiscated, most were made to work excessively long hours, many were not paid their full wages, and roughly one-quarter said their employers physically or sexually abused them — while explicitly cautioning that it “makes no statistical claims… regarding the prevalence of abuse against the total population of domestic workers in Oman.” The 47% action-side figure is therefore not a documented prevalence rate but a harm proxy: a stand-in for the share of migrants likely to experience rights violations severe enough to plausibly generate regret. The ILO’s “Domestic Workers Across the World” report sizes and legally frames the channel — it counts the domestic-work labour market and maps how far these workers are included in or excluded from working-time, minimum-wage, and maternity protections — rather than documenting Gulf recruitment abuses directly; the abuse documentation on the action side rests on HRW, not the ILO statistical report. Because the workers’ legal status is controlled by their employer and candid survey participation is structurally impossible, no direct “do you regret this decision” survey of kafala workers exists in the published literature; the harm-proxy approach is the most defensible available method.
The inaction side reflects a different — and weaker — evidence base. There is no direct survey of non-migrants who considered but declined a Gulf contract and were asked whether they regret it. The 38% figure on this side is therefore not a measured regret rate but a structural proxy built from the income gap: the World Bank’s Migration and Development Brief records that remittances reached an estimated $656 billion to low- and middle-income countries in 2023 and remain a crucial source of external finance, and Gulf domestic-worker wages run well above the median income available at home in major sending countries. The ILO’s “Domestic Workers Across the World” report sizes the channel — at least 52.6 million domestic workers globally, heavily migrant and female in the Gulf corridor — but it is a statistical and legal-protection report and does not measure regret among those who stayed. Read this side as a foregone-opportunity exposure estimate, not a survey result; the absence of a direct non-migrant regret survey is the binding constraint, and the rate should be treated as the softest number in the entry.
The two rates produce a narrow regret_delta of 0.09, consistent with a decision that is genuinely close to balanced for the aggregate population of potential migrants — where the economic stakes and personal circumstances vary enormously across individuals. The Gilovich action-dominance pattern reflects the asymmetry in documentation quality: harm to those who did migrate is systematically recorded by HRW and ILO; foregone income for those who stayed is reconstructed from income-gap data rather than direct surveys. The kafala system is under formal legal reform in Qatar and Saudi Arabia since 2020 and 2021 respectively, meaning current workers may face a structurally different risk environment than that captured in the 2018 to 2020 source studies. Nationality and recruitment channel matter substantially: workers recruited directly by verified employers face lower contract-substitution risk than those recruited through third-party brokers, and the entry should not be read as a uniform risk assessment across all kafala-mediated contracts.