That the government has opened the door to Saudi citizenship is welcome news. The more we open our society to newcomers, the quicker we achieve a society that is modern and diverse. We will also get rid of our inherent xenophobia that we practice but rarely admit.
There are, however, drawbacks to the caveats attached to the rules regulating this process. This is a heavily titled society: Academic and otherwise. So opening up the citizenship process to those with doctorates and masters degrees only is rather redundant. Our universities churn out such quasi-scholars by the load every year. We also have the help of a plethora of universities in Egypt and the West who do their best to supply us with titled Saudis who can’t read their names.
These titled academics will want a big desk, a light schedule, adulation for their intellectual ‘prowess,’ and the lightest schedule this side of Sudan. Why bother then to make them citizens when we can supply the world with this quality of labor?
What we lack are artisans of all sorts: People with vocations and métiers and are willing to practice them. We need bricklayers, shopkeepers, plumbers, electricians, artists, and poets who can write in meter, novelists who can develop a character, scientists who can invent medicines, actors who are talented in their field and can recite a soliloquy without stammering. We need nation builders like those who built up America. America asks the world to give it its ‘huddled masses’ and not its titled citizens.
Irish farmers escaping the famine and Italians escaping draught and poverty, among others, were the ones who built up America. The Vietnamese boat people are now the scientists and the entrepreneurs of modern day America. That is the type of people we need in this place.
It is useless arguing that we can do our own chores. This is simply not true. The feisty Yemenis, those men and women who welcome physical work and glory in it, are the ones who helped us build our nation back in the 1960s and 1970s with talents ranging from bricklaying to bread baking. The Bukharis from Central Asia gave us the culture, the food, the labor, and the talent of a people who are now an integral part of this society. None of them came with an education, let alone a degree.
This country needs farmers from Egypt, for example, who will till the soil, care for it, make it produce, and forge a link with it that is more solid than any tenuous link a fat professor will ever give it. We need teachers from Lebanon and Syria to become citizens who will help our children decipher the languages of this world.
These people, no matter where their provenance, will have the energy, the talent, the desire, and the will to make a new life by working hard to achieve it. They will instill this ethic in their children and put us on the road to nationhood in a modern and beneficial sense.
Best of all, they will not be intimidated by Saudi citizens since they will have the rights and the legal status to protect them. This might help to give the rest of us the proverbial kick up the backside to get on with it and do some decent work before it is too late.
