ABU DHABI: Gulf Arab states, where foreigners make up half the work force, should give employment preference to their citizens over expatriate labor, Saudi Prince Turki Al-Faisal said yesterday.
“We should review our economic policies in a serious manner to build national economies that benefit their people and not the millions of foreign workers,” Prince Turki said at a conference on human resources in Abu Dhabi.
Prince Turki is chairman of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies. He is a former ambassador to Washington and London and before that spent more than 25 years as the head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service.
“It’s not understandable that there be one unemployed Gulf national in countries that receive millions of foreign workers,” he said.
The six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have witnessed six-years of growth fueled by a surge in the price of oil — their main source of income — triggering a construction and services industries boom that required millions of foreign workers.
The GCC comprises Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Foreign unskilled workers, mainly from Southeast Asia, and skilled labor make up an average of 50 percent of the work force in the Gulf Arab region, reaching as high as 92 percent in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar and 60 percent in Saudi Arabia, according to Baqer Al-Najjar, professor of sociology at the University of Bahrain. Prince Turki warned that the current policy of bringing in foreign labor threatened the demographic make-up of the region.
“If these policies continue, we will no doubt become minorities in our countries,” he said.
“We, especially in Gulf Arab countries, are in one of the most dangerous regions. We suffer and will suffer from security, economic, social, cultural, and demographic problems if we do not tackle the situation,” he said.
