Driven by foreign investment, tourism in the archipelago of Zanzibar has experienced substantial growth over the last thirty years. Even though it was meant to promote local employment and economic development, foreigners – and Europeans in particular – remained the largest investors as well as the primary beneficiaries. Tourism development has created new employment opportunities, but it has only benefited the local communities to a certain extent, in part because it has promoted a considerable migration of workers from mainland Tanzania. Nowadays, Tanzania mainlanders constitute a very large share of workforce employed in the Zanzibar tourism sector. Focusing on foreign managers and entrepreneurs (who play a major role in the industry), this study investigates the mechanisms that influence recruitment of the workforce in the tourism formal sector. This research suggests that the recruitment process undergoes dramatic alterations within the inherent economic, political and religious context in a far more tangled way than has been hitherto portrayed.