Nearly one in every four people living in the Maldives today is an expatriate. In the Greater Malé Region, the epicentre of almost every major reclamation project this country has undertaken, that presence is even more visible, if you know where to look. Walk through the Industrial Zone of Hulhumalé and you will find labour accommodation quarters housing anywhere from ten to three hundred workers at a time, depending on how many projects their employer has running. These are the men who pour the concrete, lay the roads, and build the towers on land that did not exist a generation ago. And yet in almost every conversation we have about reclaimed islands — who they are for, who benefits, who belongs — this workforce is almost entirely absent.

A Quarter of the Population, Almost Entirely Overlooked

My research on Hulhumalé surveyed households across the island's income groups, and the contrast that emerged was stark. Among Maldivian residents, most households earn upward of MVR 30,000 a month. Among the expatriate construction workers surveyed, the overwhelming majority earned less than MVR 10,000, about a fifth as much. All of the male workers surveyed lived in shared labour quarters in the island's industrial zone; the small number of female workers shared apartments with up to six other women, separately in residential areas. None of them had any avenues for social integration. None of them were consulted on matters relating to their well-being and safety on the island. None of them owned local bank accounts. Most did not have smartphones. And in case of emergencies, they had no way of knowing what was happening, nowhere to go, no one to turn to. Across every measure tested, migrant workers were the most vulnerable.

Built to Leave

But the truth is that the workforce that built the island, and the settlements on it, was never meant to stay. Most workers are on contracts of one to two years, rotated in and out as projects begin and end. Those who do stay back tend to filter into low-paying jobs at the bottom of the economic ladder. Roughly half the workers I interviewed said they remit almost their entire income home, retaining only enough for daily expenses. They are, in the truest sense, temporary residents of a place they built to last.

Invisible in Plain Sight

That temporariness shapes everything else about their lives on the island. Many reported working up to ten hours a day, which left little time or energy for anything beyond work. Very few took part in community activities of any kind — not out of disinterest, but because they simply did not know where such activities happened or felt too isolated to join in even when they did. Socializing also required spare income, which many did not have. Only a handful said they exchanged food or gifts with neighbours, a basic marker of belonging that most Maldivian households on the island took for granted. Some described a quiet loneliness: living invisibly among hundreds of people, on one of the most densely populated islands in the world, while remaining almost entirely disconnected from the community around them.

A City Built Without Them in Mind

This is not a story of neglect so much as a story of design. Hulhumalé, like most of the Maldives' reclaimed islands, was planned around a particular resident: a Maldivian family, ideally home-owning, ideally with access to the capital's schools and hospitals. The workforce that made this island possible was never accounted for.

A Structural Blind Spot, Not Just a Maldivian One

None of this is unique to the Maldives. Migrant construction labour underpins reclamation and infrastructure projects across the Gulf, across Singapore, across much of coastal Asia. But it is worth naming plainly in our own context, because the invisibility of this workforce is not incidental. It is structural. Our housing policies and land use plans do not account for them. Our social protection systems do not extend to them. Our early warning systems fall short in including them. Even our academic and journalistic conversations about land reclamation tend to focus on Maldivian winners and losers, as though the tens of thousands of foreign workers who make these projects physically possible were simply part of the machinery rather than people living, however briefly, real lives on this land.

Who Are We Actually Building For?

As the Maldives continues to reclaim land for new housing, new industry, and new infrastructure, it is worth asking a different question than the ones we usually ask. Not just who the island is being built for, but who is building it — and what, if anything, we owe them while they do. A labour force housed hundreds to a room, working ten or more hours a day, largely absent from the communities they live alongside, is not a footnote to the story of land reclamation in this country. It is one of its central, if rarely told, chapters.