>No one confiscates passports, it is a nonsense. Confiscate is probably too extreme a word, but when I lived in UAE many employers held onto (e.g. in the offic

>No one confiscates passports, it is a nonsense. Confiscate is probably too extreme a word, but when I lived in UAE many employers held onto (e.g. in the office safe) their employees passports. At some point I think the government realized this could be abused, and then there was an centralized office (at least in Jebel Ali, it was different in Abu Dhabi) where your employer asked you to have them hold your passport. To get your passport you had to get a letter from your employer saying it was okay for you to get it. Or, in my case, I left my job and got it back. Personally, I hated the fact that I had to ask my employer for my passport when I got accepted into Grad school in the US and had to tell my employer I needed it for a few days to get a visa. I never questioned the legality of it though, and according to this it's not legal for employers to force you to hand over your passport. https://gulfnews.com/uae/find-out-if-your-employer-is-authorised-to-withhold-your-passport-1.76097893 https://gulfnews.com/uae/find-out-if-your-employer-is-author... But like most legal things, when you are on a work visa you are scared of anything that might harm that. So you don't challenge or ask questions. It's pretty common for people on H1B to stay at an job they hate even though changing jobs on H1B is supposed to be easy. I certainly stayed at a bad job longer than I wanted to until my green card process hit a certain point. I think legally I could have changed earlier, but the company immigration attorney certainly gaslighted me on many things, and I was just too scared to take any risks with visa stuff. It's easy for a company to exploit that fear.