United Arab Emirates: Sending home the foreigners

[Serpentine]

No country kicks out the wealthy and smart people.

I have heard they also deported about 500 Iranian merchants, some of them lived in UAE for about 25 years, to Iran.That's a good news for me.

 

[forcetrip]

I have heard they also deported about 500 Iranian merchants, some of them lived in UAE for about 25 years, to Iran.That's a good news for me.

Oh well .. Arabs are the exception to every rule .. Again with the generalizing, my bad.

 

[Argus Panoptes]

@Argus Panoptes

All expat workers from GCC should be shipped back so that they can march on the 'constitution avenue' to demand jobs.

Apparently, now even senior civil servants who are foreigners are at risk of deportation. We need good and efficient civil servants. Let's try to get some of them here:

United Arab Emirates: Sending the foreigners home | The Economist


United Arab Emirates
Sending the foreigners home
The sacking of foreign civil servants may become a regional trend
Jul 13th 2013 | ABU DHABI |From the print edition

AMID unrest in the Gulf, the authorities in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), have in recent years sought to give more public-sector jobs to local citizens. But this drive towards “Emiratisation”, a policy launched three decades ago, may be accelerating. On July 4th the General Secretariat of the Executive Council (GSEC), Abu Dhabi’s top policy-making body, which reports to the ruling council under Muhammad bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the crown prince, fired almost all its foreign staff.

Some 60-70 people are thought to have got the chop, including many of the emirate’s most efficient senior civil servants. The GSEC is presumably confident it can fill the vacuum with Emiratis already on its staff. But foreigners working for the government will be twitchy, as Emiratisation speeds up.

The sacked workers have had their visas extended by six months to give them a chance to find alternative work; foreigners can reside in the UAE only if they have a job, and their visas are normally revoked after a month without one. Though the public sector is already staffed mainly by Emiratis, more than 90% of whom work for the state or for bodies close to it, a few thousand foreigners still have middling or senior government jobs.

Jobs for our boys

Abu Dhabi is not the only place in the region to be pushing more locals into the job market. Kuwait announced earlier this year that it would reduce by a million the number of foreign workers in the country over the next ten years. More drastically, it has begun to deport foreigners for traffic violations, though it has denied that that is part of a policy to reduce their number.

Saudi Arabia has also long pursued “Saudi-isation”, whereby firms are made to replace foreigners with Saudi workers. Under the current law, known as nitaqat (“categories”), companies are classified by green, yellow and red labels that denote the extent to which they have complied with employment quotas. All firms, even those with fewer than ten employees, are supposed to hire at least one Saudi citizen.

The three other members of the Gulf Co-operation Council—Bahrain, Oman and Qatar—have their own variations on the theme of making their citizens work. Across the region, a further cull of jobs for foreigners looks likely.

From the print edition: Middle East and Africa

 

[Kompromat]

This will help, lower the brotherhood fever, things will come back to natural order.

@Argus Panoptes

 

[Argus Panoptes]

This will help, lower the brotherhood fever, things will come back to natural order.

@Argus Panoptes

It is Dinar Fever, Sir. As long as there is more money to be made compared to "back home", expatriates will continue to put up with arbitrary and discriminatory treatment without much protest.