Kuwait is preparing to force 360,000 foreign employees to leave the country, according to local press reports, at the latest sign of how the Gulf expat is suffering from the worst economic crisis caused by low oil costs and the coronavirus crisis.
According to the Kuwait Times, the government and parliament are approaching an agreement on a plan to “drastically reduce the number of expats in the country.” The targets come with many of the most vulnerable. The newspaper quoted Osama Al-Shaheen, a member of the National Assembly’s Labor Resources Development Committee, stating that those at risk of deportation come with 90,000 marginal and low-education employees, 120,000 undocumented employees and 150,000 expats over the age of 60. the latter is an organization composed of employees, dependents and others with chronic diseases.
There is not yet an exact timetable for this exodus, but it may only take several years. At the same time, the government seeks to assure the citizens of the country that they will not suffer the economic recession. On Monday, Finance Minister Barrak Al-Sheetan told official news firm KUNA that “the government has not taken any resolution that has an effect on nationals’ wallets, wages or rights.”
As has been the case in countries around the world, the Gulf has suffered seriously from the coronavirus pandemic, and corporations close the blinds and send home.
Unrest has worsened due to the collapse of oil revenues this year. But the unusual nature of Gulf societies means that pain has not been lightly distributed. While local citizens tend to recover from wage cuts or layoffs, the region’s huge expatriate labor force has few defenses to oppose a recession.
In the past, the oil-rich Gulf was a position in which others around the world would be looking for work, from low-wage staff working in harmful conditions to executives looking for a way of life that wasn’t available at home.
Now the tide has changed. A combination of low-income oil and the debilitating effects of coronavirus blockages means that many jobs in the region have evaporated under the scorching sun and many others are now leaving, some by choice, others by restriction.
In Saudi Arabia, around 300,000 more people have already left this year, according to local investment bank Jadwa Investment. This would possibly be just the tip of the iceberg. Jadwa says it expects about 1.2 million expatriate employees to leave the local labor market by 2020.
Back in Kuwait, Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah Khaled Al-Hamad Al-Sabah said earlier this year that he was looking for the proportion of expats in his country to increase from 70% to 30%, meaning 2.5 million more people would. Having to get out.
This purpose may not be feasible, but despite this, many leave. According to local media in Kuwait, some 110,000 expats left the country for a three-month period from mid-March to mid-June, some of them were visitors rather than migrant workers.
Events in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia resonate in the rest of the region. More than 113,000 foreigners have left Oman since the beginning of the year, according to the knowledge of the country’s National Statistics and Information Center. Overall, the country’s expat population has 262,000 other people, more than 12%, since its peak in April 2017.
In Bahrain, there was a slight drop in expatriate personnel between June 2018 and June 2019, with a drop of 1% to 594,944 at the end of this period, according to the latest knowledge on the online website of the country’s Labour Market Regulatory Authority.
As the figures in Bahrain and elsewhere suggest, this year’s economic crises have accelerated a trend that has been going on for some time, as governments have tried to inspire more local citizens to paint in the personal sector (where expats have painted) and move away from the public sector. However, this increase has been limited in success. In Saudi Arabia, for example, local unemployment remains stagnant at around 12% despite a decrease in the number of expats in recent years.
This year’s occasions mean that the speed of expat outings is accelerating in the region. What is not transparent is whether many other people who are leaving now will return when oil costs recover and the coronavirus crisis subsides. Otherwise, it will leave savings permanently smaller and with a significant shortage of labor and skills.
There are recurrent disorders in other countries in the region and beyond. Many of those who left sent cash to their home country. These remittances play an important role in the economies of many poorer countries in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. As jobs disappeared, so did those cross-border bills.
Dominic Dudley is a freelance journalist with nearly two decades of experience in business, economic and political reporting in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and
Dominic Dudley is a freelance journalist with nearly two decades of experience in business, economic and political reporting in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe.