Planned Kuwait expat deportations will hurt the economy

Published:  10 May at 6 PM
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Tagged: Visas, Immigration, Jobs
A prominent Kuwaiti labour union is criticising the recently announced move by the Kuwaiti government to get rid of 100,000 expat workers a year until 2023.

The announcement of the plan, made by Kuwait’s labour minister Thekra al-Rasheedi, has seen increases in visa trafficking and a huge rise in recruitment costs, according to the president of the Expatriate Labour Force Office, part of Kuwait’s Trade Union Federation. Abdurrahman al-Ghanim stated that the construction of several mega-projects will be threatened by a lack of technical expertise if the plan goes ahead.

According to Al-Ghanim, the government would do better by concentrating on closing immigration loopholes in Kuwait’s sponsorship system which allow large-scale people-trafficking. Targeting skilled expat workers, he stated, is not the way forward and will harm the country’s economy rather than solve its unbalanced demographic baseline and cut local unemployment.

Human traffickers, he explained, exploit the system by creating fake companies, ordering work permits and selling them to workers eager to migrate to the emirate. In recent months, Kuwait, along with a number of other Middle Eastern countries, has imposed a number of punitive policies on expat workers in the name of creating more jobs for indigenous workers.

Representatives of international companies based in the region have reacted harshly to the measures, saying that local workers are unable to replace skilled staff from overseas as they lack the education and experience in essential sectors such as oil and finance. Opinions within the region’s government are also divided, with many officials agreeing that training up local employees would take far longer than the 10 years allocated to the plan.
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Comments » There is 1 comment

Maqbool wrote 10 years ago:

Good morning sir, I am an expatriate working and living with my family in Kuwait from last 5 years. Few days ago me and my wife was harassed by a policemen. He asked us to show our documents and we showed him. Our all documents were valid but then also he forced us to sit in a police car for an hour and took our finger scan. Is it allowed for a policemen to do such a worst things? Why we are harassed in this country even if we have our valid documents? Why don't government take any legal action against such type of policemen? Why they are free to do anything they want with poor expatriates in their country? May be this is a job of policemen in this country Kuwait.

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