CAIRO (Middle East Eye) – Youssef, a 56-year-old Egyptian, had been working in Kuwait for two decades when he was suddenly ordered to leave after being inexplicably fired from his job.
“From one day to the next, everything changed: for no apparent reason, my kafeel [local sponsor] terminated my employment contract and I had to swiftly return to Egypt,” he told Middle East Eye.
“In recent years, more and more Egyptian immigrants find themselves confronted with this situation: either their employer decides to get rid of them without warning, or it’s the nationalization policies that do it,” he said.
“We Egyptians are no longer welcome in Persian Gulf countries - emigrating there has become much more difficult than before.”
For the first time since the 1970s, Egyptian immigrants in oil monarchies are being discouraged by state policies advocating for workforce nationalization.
In 2020, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia hosted 64 percent of all Egyptians living abroad, but this figure is set to decline drastically in the coming decade.
Expulsion numbers in recent years have continued to increase: 2,000 Egyptians were ordered to leave Kuwait in 2019.
In Saudi Arabia, no fewer than 30,000 Egyptians were told to return to their country of origin in 2017.
In 2020, Kuwaiti authorities set up a plan to nationalize the country’s jobs and demographics, hoping to achieve a ratio of “70 percent Kuwaitis to 30 percent expatriates” by 2030.
Similarly, the Vision 2030 plan set up in Saudi Arabia by Mohammed bin Salman in 2016 compels companies to increase the number of Saudi employees or face sanctions.
For one 25-year-old Cairo graduate who spent his childhood in Kuwait, such nationalization policies are fuelled by xenophobia.
“From an early age, some Kuwaitis made us feel that we Egyptians were inferior to them,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Beyond the insults - the adjective ‘Egyptian’ is literally used by Kuwaitis to designate an uneducated person - the laws are deeply xenophobic.”
Until August 2021, for example, non-Saudis were not allowed to own real estate in the kingdom. In Kuwait, a similar rule still exists.
“And over the past decade, many Kuwaitis have started publicly blaming immigrants for all their problems and demanding that we be sent back to our countries of origin,” the graduate added.
In 2018, Safa Al-Hashem, a Kuwaiti parliamentarian, called for immigrants residing in the country to pay a tax for “the air they breathe”.
Among the laws put in place by oil monarchies to regulate immigration is the controversial system of kafala (guardianship), which obliges candidates to find a local to sponsor their entry into the country and vouch for them throughout their stay.
Until the introduction of recent reforms in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the kafeel - usually the employer - had to be consulted before their employee could leave the territory, sometimes making it impossible for exploited employees to escape.
This stressful climate, coupled with the hope of economic and social renewal brought about by the Arab Spring, prompted Mahmoud to return alone to Cairo in 2013 to continue his studies, leaving his family behind.