Face flushed in the near-100 degree heat, body limp, white rings of dried sweat and scabs circling his scalp, 3-month-old Ezekiel lay in the arms of his 29-year-old mother, two among an estimated 1,000 Filipino workers now living in a vacant lot next to their country’s consulate in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah.

“All of us us here, we want to go back home to the Philippines. As soon as possible,” said the mother, Joanne Punongbayan. Others around her lined up with even younger infants for care at a makeshift first-aid clinic, set up for the expatriate workers living in the warren of shelters that have sprung up outside the consulate. Some queued for boiled and fried noodles and fritters served from a communal kitchen.

The tent city at the Philippine consulate is one of the most dramatic outgrowths of Saudi Arabia’s recent crackdown on what by some estimates are 2 million to 3 million foreign workers living in the kingdom without proper documentation.

Saudi Arabia is seeking to break the kingdom’s reliance on cheaper foreign labor and get more Saudis into the private sector, in what the Saudi government and most analysts say is a badly needed overhaul of the Saudi labor market.

As part of that restructuring, the kingdom has given foreign workers who are working without the proper paperwork until July to sort out their working documents and visas, or face deportation.

Many workers went into hiding for days when the government first announced the crackdown, and some still fear they may be imprisoned in Saudi Arabia rather than immediately deported. The workers outside the Philippines consulate, however, mostly saw the Saudi deportation orders as an opportunity, rather than a threat.

Many workers in the tent city are seeking deportation after fleeing their employers due to abuse, said Marion Guinto, a resident in tent city helping to coordinate meals, medical care and hygiene for the camp. They say that their employers withheld wages, beat them, or subjected them to sexual abuse, Ms. Guinto added.

Ms. Punongbayan, for example, says her employer in Saudi Arabia failed to pay her, withheld adequate food for her and her baby, and punctuated household commands with slaps. Ms. Punongbayan’s own husband seized his own chance months ago to flee the abuse, and returned to the Philippines, abandoning her.

When Ms. Punongbayan heard earlier this spring that Saudi Arabia was getting rid of foreign workers, her hopes rose. “I planned my escape,” she says, recounting stashing her clothes in the garbage can outside her employer’s home so she could grab them as she ran away with Ezekiel, her son.

But even getting deported is proving to be a challenge. Under the sponsorship visa system used by Saudi Arabia and most of the Gulf, the workers must obtain permission from their original employers and visa sponsor to leave the country – the same employers whose abuses many of the workers are fleeing. Employers in the kingdom and in the rest of the Gulf also typically take and hold their workers’ passports.

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