George Naufal during the Monthly Dialogue series on “The Economics of Migration in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries” at Georgetown University. Abdul Basit
Doha: The proportion of Arab migrant workers in the oil-rich GCC region has dropped substantially over the past several years, says a labour market expert.
In 1970’s post-oil boom, Arab migrants constituted nearly 70 percent of the foreign workforce in the region while Asians were a meagre 18 percent. The situation continued for a long time but reversed dramatically by 2005, when the sudden flow of Asian foreign force reached 56 percent while only 21 percent of Arabs remained in the region.
“During the late 1980s, the Gulf States started making it hard for Arabs to obtain visas, but the 1991 Gulf war changed the situation,” George Naufal, assistant professor of economics at the American University of Sharjah, said yesterday.
He was speaking on “The Economics of Migration in the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries” at the monthly dialogue series of Georgetown University’s Centre for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) in Doha.
Despite the proximity of Arabs from neighbouring countries like Egypt, Syria and Yemen to the Gulf, the six-member GCC states also preferred South Asian workers over Arabs due to their ‘economic superiority’.
Countries like UAE and Qatar, where over 90 percent of the workforce comprises foreigners, for instance, found it economically viable to employ Asians as they accepted low wages and were also willing to work in more challenging conditions.
Naufal said the GCC states also viewed a majority of workers from the neighbouring Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region as ‘trouble’ and had strict policies in place for issuing visas to them.
“A lot of it was also due to political reasons. In the 70s, non-GCC Arab workers were seen as trouble because they brought domestic ideas and ideologies, which were not welcome here. They also wanted to settle here with their families.”
Naufal, who is also a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA), said that the outlook of Gulf states on Arab workers had not changed much, particularly in the backdrop of the protests across the Arab world as people were often judged by their political affiliations.
He argued that the labour policies of Gulf countries also had a huge impact on the economy and potential development of the Mena region at large.
Over the past 10 years more than seven million jobs were created in the GCC countries, making this region the third largest labour importing regions in the world after North America and Europe. Additionally, remittances from the Gulf also amounted to nearly $71bn in 2011.
“If you are a believer of the development impact of remittances, than Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Yemen missed out on many potential investments, plans and economic consumption.” He said that until the Gulf war, the money that was being sent out from GCC countries was actually going to other Arab countries in the region, which afterwards started going to South Asia.
Naufal also said that the Gulf countries continue struggle on what to call the labour force in their country.
“The GCC countries struggle in official meeting about what to call them, and wonder if they are actual migrants, expatriates, foreign workers or contract workers.”
