I would like to stress right from the very start that these remittances are the legitimate rights of foreign workers. They have gained these funds by working in various fields in our country.
This of course does not prevent us from seeking ways and means of curbing the number of foreigners in our country and ultimately reducing their money transfers, particularly as both expatriates and remittances are on the rise. While we were talking about 6 million foreigners in the Kingdom only a few years back, we are talking now about 8 million who make annual transfers of close to SR100 billion. Some other estimates put the number of remittances as much higher.
If the policy of replacing expatriates with Saudis declared by the Ministry of Labor was the natural and logical solution to reducing the number of foreigners, it remains a long-term strategy for dealing with the huge transfers that are constantly depleting the Saudi economy. The Kingdom, according to its Minister of Finance Ibrahim Al-Assaf, experiences the second highest volume of remittances made by foreign workers in the world.
If these remittances benefit the countries, where these workers come from, as the minister says, on the other hand it represents a burden on the Saudi economy.
You can imagine, as the Saudi writer Saad Al-Dousari says: “If the people who received these salaries were our unemployed sons and daughters, would they transfer them outside?” The Kingdom cannot be allowing these huge remittances at a time when a large number of its citizens are unemployed. Investment in human resources is the ideal investment for any country in the world.
Henritta Holsman Fore, CEO of Holsman International, said before a forum of sustainable competitiveness that discussed the world economic crisis that cutting expenditure on education and scientific research was one of the main causes of the world financial crisis. If the government has to implement laws that reduce foreign manpower, the private sector has to strike a balance between its own interests and that of the society at large.
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