Not the ‘Mother of the World’: How the Egyptian Regime Profits from the Misery of Refugees

A racist security campaign began in February in Egypt. Plainclothes police officers fanned out across Cairo, targeting Syrians, Sudanese, South Sudanese, and nationals of other sub-Saharan African countries.

In one episode the National Security surrounded of the home of Egyptian human rights defender Nour Khalil, director of a platform for refugees in Egypt, over his reporting on the death of a Sudanese man under torture, an operation steeped in blatant racial profiling and state-backed racism, one that turned routine errands like buying bread into arbitrary identity checks for any Black person who dared to walk the streets of Cairo. Those found without valid residency permits were arrested, even when they presented UNHCR cards or proof of appointments to renew their residency. In just two weeks, 5,000 refugees were hauled into overcrowded police stations, leaving entire communities gripped by terror.

Among the campaign’s victims was Mubarak Qamar al-Din, a 67-year-old Sudanese refugee suffering from diabetes and kidney failure, whose only crime was breathing as a migrant in Cairo before he met his death in a cell due to medical neglect. Despite having recently renewed his UNHCR card, Mubarak fell victim to a security purge targeting “irregular migration.”

The campaign is unprecedented in its scope and repression. It came as the culmination of a recent string of repressive policies that are destroying migrant families and communities and have led to arrests, abductions, forced deportations, and deaths in custody. The Egyptian regime has adopted several absurd, false narratives to justify the persecution; among them that Egypt is the rescuing brother, and that refugees are a burden on the state. Yet what lies behind the persecution is, in truth, an economic crisis that has turned the regime into a system of mercenaries for European interests, using refugees as scapegoats while profiting from their misery.

Ongoing Destruction of Communities

Even before the campaign, migrants in Egypt were living a life resembling an inescapable trap. Though they may be safe from direct armed violence, they remain locked in a state of legal uncertainty and are forced to rely on informal livelihoods marked by the most extreme exploitation.

A core factor in this situation is the state’s persistent portrayal of migrants and refugees as “temporary”, a characterization that effectively denies them any possibility of formal integration, political participation, and social rights. Egyptian laws and official practices focus on migrants’ eventual return, offering few pathways, if any, to permanent residency or citizenship for non-Egyptians. This prolonged “stay” leads to endless cycles of systemic violence and state-sanctioned neglect.

The Newly Engineered System of Persecution

The recent deaths are not isolated tragedies or administrative errors, but part of a systematic pattern of arbitrary arrests and deportations that has intensified since the issuance of Egypt’s 2024 Asylum Law. The law transferred responsibility for refugee affairs from UNHCR to a new government committee, marking a shift from international oversight to full government control. The campaign was officially launched under the pretext of enforcing immigration and residency laws, but in practice it has produced increases in forced deportation and violations of life’s basics such as freedom of movement, health, and education. Under the new regulation, the regime has granted itself the authority to arbitrarily deport anyone deemed a threat to “public order.”
More dangerous still is that the law divides asylum applications into two categories—”legitimate” and “illegitimate”—based on how a person entered Egypt, with those who arrived irregularly facing longer vetting periods and higher deportation risks. According to the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, this raises serious concerns about criminalizing asylum seekers and denying protection to those unable to access regular migration routes.

Alongside the wave of arrests, it became clear how, in the darkness of police stations, freedom literally has a price. Detainees are interrogated not only about their legal status, but about their ability to pay “settlement fees.” Those who can pay, or who find a broker to pay on their behalf, receive a temporary deferral of deportation; those who cannot are left to rot in cells where they must sleep in shifts due to the lack of space. Families often have no choice but to turn to brokers who charge exorbitant fees to “expedite” procedures or secure a relative’s release. Administrative ambushes—such as scheduling residency-renewal appointments at dates far in the future, reaching 2027 or 2029—use these provocative tactics to transform refugees into a targeted group of the “illegal,” leaving families in a legal limbo where they cannot work, access healthcare, or send their children to school.

Europe’s Mercenaries

The policy of placing migrants in conditions of forced legal instability did not come about by chance. In the context of an 8-billion-euro EU support package and what was portrayed as a “new golden age” of cooperation, Egypt becomes eager to please its donor, turning into a central partner in Europe’s foreign policy. The agreement, which can only be described as money in exchange for carrying out repression, has equipped and reinforced the Egyptian security apparatus to act as a mercenary border guard for “Fortress Europe.”
Yet these very mercenaries ultimately fall prey themselves to Egypt’s fragile economic system, in which an estimated 60% of the population lives below or near the poverty line. Lower-ranking police officers survive on salaries eroded by a currency that has lost half its value. As a result, Europe’s hysterical “management” of the so-called “migration crisis” has turned the detention of migrants in Egypt into a savage source of income for low-ranking officials to cover their expenses.

Scapegoat

To make matters worse, migrants have become a convenient and useful political tool for the ruling elites to evade their political responsibilities in the face of an ongoing economic catastrophe. Regime media outlets and aggressive online campaigns have cast refugees as scapegoats, blaming their presence for insanely rising property prices and the depletion of national resources, as if this very crisis were not the result of political choices made by the same military-capitalist elite that hollowed out public services and amassed unimaginable wealth over generations. The narrative of the refugee “burden” has become an escape hatch for the regime, on which it blames the poverty of services and the rising rents produced by its own injustice and exploitation.

Political Marginalization

The new law’s regulations also included crude dimensions of political repression. Migrants and refugees are now compelled to “respect Egypt’s values and traditions” and are barred from any political or partisan activity, on the grounds that such involvement threatens “national security.”

About a year ago, a number of Syrians in 6th of October City came out to celebrate the fall of the Assad regime, and the regime responded to the gatherings with excessive repression, arresting some and deporting others. It is a regime extremely sensitive to any political mobilization, especially from migrants who come from countries that have recently undergone revolutions, such as Syria and Sudan.

Through these policies, the regime is attempting to create a migrant working class that is not permitted political participation and that is kept in an extremely precarious position, making it difficult for them to struggle to improve their conditions while capital steals the value of their labor. There is no way to improve working conditions and wages in Egypt generally, while migrants form an oppressed segment of this working class.

Profiting from Misery

Recently, the Egyptian regime shifted its rhetoric from portraying the migrant population as a “burden” to an even more absurd tone, discussing strategies “to convert millions of refugees from a latent cost into an organized economic asset”, as if migrants had no value except through their economic productivity. Parliamentarians framed the concept of “integration” in purely exploitative terms: it is not about the dignity and protection of migrants so much as about “reaping the fruits of their entrepreneurial commercial skills” by formalizing their informal economies to broaden the tax base. This is aimed primarily at easing the pressure on the state budget.

Shattering the Myth

The regime has long sung the empty myths it has tried to entrench, especially abroad, to promote itself: Egypt “Mother of the World!”, the eternal, home of ancient civilization and bewitching beauty. It thrives amid its “turbulent, troubled region” and races toward a future of prosperity, built on gleaming modern national mega-projects. A land of gracious refuge for “those who come for humanitarian reasons,” fleeing wars and conflicts, where they are welcomed as siblings and guests in their “second homeland.” A benevolent nation that has risen “to the heart of regional migration events,” treating the migrant community with dignity without herding them into camps. This is the hollow image you are supposed to imagine.

If we strip away this enchanting mask, the disturbing, uncomfortable picture emerges: a desperate regime in a bind, drowning under a crushing debt crisis, clinging to this narrative as a lifeline to attract more foreign capital and preserve its legitimacy globally. Under this regime, the nine million migrants residing in it have become a commodity, traded mercilessly to improve its reputation on the world stage—cards in an absurd game in which “hospitality” is shaped by the logic of security control. A game that has already claimed the lives of those the regime claims to host and protect.

Who treats their guests this way? Egypt has not yet risen to the level of its own myth as the “Mother of the World.” But in the end, the real problem does not stem from Egypt shattering its image of itself; it stems from its using the very idea of hospitality as a weapon to justify a system built on extortion, arrest, exploitation, and racist control.

Original article in Arabic here.