Amid a slump in oil prices and the coronavirus pandemic, there has been a spike in anti-expat rhetoric as lawmakers and government officials call for reducing the number of foreigners in Kuwait.
8 lakh Indians could be forced to leave Kuwait after a parliamentary committee approved a draft expat-quota bill seeking to gradually slash the number of foreign workers in the Gulf country, according to a Gulf News report.
The Middle East is headed for an economic downturn this year that dwarfs 2008 and 2014/2015 as countries are hit by the double blow from coronavirus closures and record low oil prices, according to the International Monetary Fund, forcing the nation to safeguard jobs for its own citizens.
What is the expat-quota bill?
Last month, Kuwait’s Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah Al Khalid Al Sabah proposed reducing the number of expats in the country from 70 percent to 30 percent of the population.
The bill, simply put, means that Kuwait will have a 'quota system' for employing foreigner workers the Gulf nation to address 'demographic imbalance'.
The Kuwait Assembly Speaker said the draft law they intend to file will propose to impose a cap on the number of expats, whose numbers must decrease gradually by stating that this year expats will be 70 per cent, next year 65 per cent and so on, the report said.
How will this affect Indians living there?
The National Assembly's legal and legislative committee determined the expat quota bill constitutional, according to which, Indians should not exceed 15 per cent of Kuwait's population, which means around 800,000 of them might be required to leave Kuwait.
The new expatriate policy is line with the Kuwaiti Prime Minister’s statement in June which stated that the number of foreigners in the country will be reduced gradually in order to stop Kuwaitis being a minority in their own country.
According to the Indian embassy in Kuwait, there are about 28,000 Indians working for the Kuwaiti Government in various jobs like nurses, engineers in national oil companies and a few as scientists.
The majority of Indians (5.23 Lakh) are deployed in private sectors. In addition, there are about 1.16 lakh dependents. Out of these, there are about 60,000 Indian students studying in 23 Indian schools in the country.
According to Amnesty International, the six countries that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) - Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar – host the majority of the estimated 23 million migrant workers living in the Arab states.
Who can stay?
A major concern is that 1.3 million of the 3.35 million expats are either illiterate or can merely read and write, said the Speaker of the Assembly Marzouq Al-Ghanem. “I understand that we recruit doctors and skilled manpower and not unskilled labourers. This is an indication that there is a distortion,” he added.
His comment highlighted that around 6,50,000 workers from South East countries are employed as domestic workers.
An official in the Indian embassy in Kuwait told PTI that the Kuwaitgovernment is yet to inform the embassy about any such measure being taken to drastically reduce the number of Indians in the country.
"There is a lot of talk in the media but we haven't officially received anything," he said.
The official said the move is easier said than done as a large proportion of Indians living and working in the country can be categorised as essential services personnel.
India-Kuwait relations
Kuwait is a top source of remittances for India. In 2018, India received nearly USD 4.8 billion from Kuwait as remittances.
Foreigners have accounted for the majority of Kuwait’s Covid-19 cases as the disease spread among migrant workers living in overcrowded housing.
Will this move really help Kuwait?
According to a Bloomberg report, expatriates get to earn better incomes in a low-tax environment -- part of which is repatriated home -- but are vulnerable with few safety nets in their host nation or routes to citizenship. As countries in the Gulf rolled out tens of billions of dollars worth of stimulus measures geared toward helping companies and banks survive the slowdown triggered by Covid-19 and cheaper oil, most initiatives targeted business owners rather than employees.
While Kuwait has slowly been replacing public-sector expatriates with nationals, the pandemic has accelearted the process. Since foreigners have accounted for a majority of the Covid-19 cases, anti-expatriate rhetoric is popular among the voters.
The Prime Minister has promised to finish the legal process by October 2020 as elections are scheduled for November.
(With inputs from agencies)