Dealing with expats
A story in Arab News last Friday about expatriate women in Saudi Arabia seeking jobs to help their families back home or simply make ends meet in the Kingdom confirms and gives a local flavor to the finding of an HSBC survey on foreigners' plight. Some of them said they were keen to leave Saudi Arabia.
Conducted late last year, the HSBC Expat Explorer survey found out that 34 percent of those contacted wanted to leave the country for a variety of reasons, ranging from rising cost of living to education or inability to save enough money, the very prime reasons for leaving their own countries in the first place.
This trend among the Kingdom’s expatriates is not unique. That climate is being replicated all over the Gulf countries. The same HSBC survey found out that the expatriates in Qatar who wanted to leave their host country amounted to 30 percent, while those in Oman it was slightly lower at 29 percent.
But these percentages could be seen alarming when compared with the world average, which is 13 percent, if one is speaking about the competitiveness of the Gulf environment in attracting expatriates.
HSBC Expats' Explorer Survey indicated that Southeast Asia has come to the fore as a leading destination for expat earning potential. With Singapore topping the Expat Explorer Economics league table, this table uses a number of factors like earning levels, disposable income and ability to accumulate luxuries to rank the countries targeted by expatriates. In addition to Singapore, four more Asian countries make it also to the top of the table. They are Thailand, which occupied the third place, followed by Hong Kong, then China in the seventh spot and Vietnam in the tenth.
But despite this, the Gulf countries have shown a relatively high degree of satisfaction expressed by expatriates ranging between 90 percent for Oman, followed closely by Qatar 89 percent, Saudi Arabia 83 percent, the UAE 77 percent and Kuwait 68 percent. All these ranked better for expatriates' satisfaction due to the economic performance in host countries. Globally the percentage is 59 according to the survey.
However, in theory it is not the job of the Gulf countries or any other country to create a conducive environment for expatriates. Governments’ main responsibilities are toward their own citizens. In the Gulf countries, their case speaks of younger and smaller population, high income and a socioeconomic development drive. That has been the case for more than four decades, which necessitates the need to open their doors for expatriates to help meet the need for skilled labor and keep things moving along development programs.
But in the meantime more and more Gulf nationals have started getting into the job market looking for employment opportunities, and gradually that turned into a hot potato issue. Though technically speaking every position held by an expatriate is vacant, yet over the years the drive to replace expatriates proved to be not an easy job to handle. And that is because of the growing globalization trend, where more and more national barriers are softened; besides the general trend gives the private sector a growing role in the economy, including providing job opportunities.
Unlike the public sector owned and managed by the government, which takes into consideration some strategic and national aspect, the private sector is driven mainly by its desire to cut cost and maximize profit. That explains the motives behind the recent row in Saudi Arabia to impose a fee on foreign workers.
On the other hand and at the time some expatriates are feeling the pinch in host countries, some of their peers are struggling to get out of their home countries. Expatriates in exporting places like Sudan, Tunisia and other countries are on the rise trying to get out looking for opportunities to the extent that some of these countries have serious thinking of putting a bureaucratic ban on migration as it is going to affect negatively on various sectors in these countries.
Recently published official figures in Sudan show, for instance, that in just six months 66,000 professionals, skilled and unskilled labor left the country and that last year alone 94,230 were registered in the government books to have left the country against 10,032 who migrated four years ago.
However, the real issue on both sides of receiving and exporting countries of labor is whether there is adequate education and training that meets the need of the market, be it in home or host country. Moreover, and with the growing globalization and the tendency of the Arab countries to move closer with the hope of beefing up inter-trade and improve their common market, it would be reasonable to speak about similar integration in the work market where skilled labor force be part of a grand design for regional integration, though charity should start at home.
