Gulf Arab States And Foreign Workers

[Dan1]

In some of these Gulf Arab countries, immigrants outnumber the natives.

Out of a total 32,362 million residents in the Gulf countries, the foreign workers number some 7 and a half million. While in some countries like Saudi Arabia the local population prevails (22 million against 3 million foreign workers) in others, regardless if it consists of unskilled workers or professionals, the immigrant labour force accounts for more than half of the population with significant peaks of 83.1% in Kuwait and 97.3% in Dubai.

[Dan1]

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2004/07/1...workers-abused

There are 8.8 million foreigners in Saudi Arabia, Labor Minister Dr. Ghazi al-Ghosaibi disclosed in May, a figure significantly higher than any that the government has previously reported. With an indigenous population of about 17 million, this means that there is almost one foreign resident for every two Saudi citizens.

The largest expatriate communities in Saudi Arabia include one million to 1.5 million people each from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, and another 900,000 each from Egypt, Sudan and the Philippines. There are also 500,000 workers from Indonesia, and another 350,000 from Sri Lanka, the majority of whom are women.

Another thing worth mentioning, these foreign workers are often treated like slaves by their Saudi overlords. Slavery was officially outlawed in Saudi Arabia in the 1960s.

[sean]

All of the wealthy Gulf States have huge foreign worker populations, I wish more people would go there instead of going into Europe. UAE is already like 80% foreign. They also do not give welfare to their foreigners, unlike countries like Sweden and Germany that rain money upon migrants.

Migrant workers often seek work in the UAE and elsewhere in the Gulf because of attractive advertising campaigns offering fair money for fair work, but in practice their experience does not match the expectations presented to them.

In the Gulf many foreign workers commit suicide before their contracts end without the worker to ever have sent money back to their family. Seems a little convenient since most the foreign workers in the Gulf have a strong cultural tradition of sending money back to their relatives.

Gulf Arab nations would be nothing without the foreign worker underclass that literally get treated like slaves. Not to mention that they have to pull all kinds of shit like confiscating their passports and that kind of thing to stop their blue collar foreign workers from breaking their contracts and going home early as a matter of course.

And as for Gulf Arab nations, in order to attract even temporary Western workers they have to pay princely salaries.

Take English teaching, for example. The average foreign English teacher in Saudi Arabia or anywhere in the Gulf really can earn as much as 5,000 or even 7,000 dollars a month!

Now the Arabs don't pay that kind of money out of the kindness of their hearts. They do so because their countries are such unpleasant places for people (even English teachers) from the West to live that they wouldn't be able to attract anyone if they paid much less.

Nevertheless, the Gulf State foreign worker model have proven to work, but it all depends on how ruthless and consistent the host nation is willing to be.

Even Japan is going with the Gulf model of temporary workers with very strict visa limitations. They won't even be eligible for marriage licenses. They're not allowed to bring family. And their visa have hard expiration dates.

Japan actually paid Brazilian-Japanese workers to leave and never come back in the 2008 global economic crisis, and the Supreme Court upheld not paying non-citizens the welfare benefits they paid into a few years back, so the Japs are going to be methodical about this.