SPECIAL EDITION: WORLD on the MOVE : A Regional Slant : In the Middle East, Politics Determines Who Works Where : The Gulf War fallout and immigration of Soviet Jews to Israel are some of the changes affecting Arab jobs. Millions are being displaced.

A young Palestinian man dispassionately sipped a cup of tea at a counter in the international departure lounge at Cairo International Airport. It was his third cup that morning. There was nothing else to do. He’d been waiting at the airport for three days.

A marine engineer, he found himself “at sea” in a different sense from usual.

As a Palestinian-- persona non grata in the Persian Gulf after the Palestine Liberation Organization’s pro-Iraqi stance during the Gulf War--the man could not remain in the United Arab Emirates when his ship docked there. Jordan, generally more sympathetic, was already hit hard by a flood of Palestinians returning from the Gulf and did not want any more. He tried Cairo because, as a native of the formerly Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip, he holds Egyptian travel documents. No such luck.

The young man was one of about a dozen Palestinians trapped for up to two months at the Cairo airport because no country will admit them--victims of a decades-old wave of labor migration that has come suddenly, and painfully, to a halt.

The exodus of Palestinians from the Gulf in the wake of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait is merely the most visible signal of a massive shift of labor patterns that is among the most significant in the history of the Middle East.

The end of the Gulf War and the Iran-Iraq conflict that preceded it, the opening of borders in North Africa, the coming displacement of North Africans in Europe and the immigration of Soviet Jews to Israel are together placing millions of Arab workers on the road. They’re also devastating countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Sudan and Yemen whose economies are heavily dependent on earnings that their citizens send home from abroad.

“There’s never been a change of this magnitude in the region,” said Abdel Fatah Gabali, an analyst at Egypt’s Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

Upward of 2.5 million workers are being displaced in Iraq and the Gulf, and perhaps half again that many will be moving west in the coming years toward Libya, experts say. An additional 1 million Soviet Jews are streaming toward Israel, many of them competing with Arabs and other Israelis for jobs in an already tight market--and forcing many Palestinians to look elsewhere for work.

In many ways, the aftermath of war in the Gulf is proving again an old regional law of migrant labor: Politics is more important than skills in determining who goes where for work.

Indeed, labor and politics have always been inextricably intertwined in the Middle East.

After relying on Arab workers during the early years of the oil boom, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries that have tiny native populations started getting uneasy. Palestinian and Egyptian workers often outnumbered the native work force. And what could one say when the workers started demanding citizenship and residency rights--a piece of the pie they had helped to make--or agitating on behalf of Arab nationalist movements?

Better, many Gulf countries figured, to bring in hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis, Indians, Thais and Filipinos--cheaper, willing to go back home when their contracts were up and with very little inclination toward Arab politics.

Kuwait, a microcosm of the employers of the Gulf, has been a mecca for foreign labor for more than 30 years. Now, as it seeks to halve its foreign population, evict the Palestinians who dominated its skilled work force and replace them mainly with Egyptian employees, the oil emirate has become a primer in the politics--and the dangers--of imported labor.

Before the Iraqi invasion of Aug. 2, 1990, Kuwait was home to workers from 136 countries. Many had lived in Kuwait for decades; together, they outnumbered Kuwaitis nearly three to one.

Even in the public sector, where most Kuwaitis are employed, nationals accounted for only 30% of the prewar work force, holding about 72,000 out of 240,000 jobs, said Kuwait University economist Yusef Ibrahim. In private-sector jobs, the rate was 95% non-Kuwaiti, Ibrahim said.

In fact, working Kuwaitis were even outnumbered by their household servants. The total work force of 800,000 included about 130,000 Kuwaitis and about 160,000 domestic servants in a country of 2.2 million, according to statistics compiled by Ibrahim.

Kuwaiti children delivered by Palestinian doctors were educated largely by Palestinian teachers. Kuwaiti adults were judged by Egyptians; until the last decade, no Kuwaiti judges sat on the bench. The country’s construction workers were Korean and Chinese, its street sweepers Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan, its mechanics stateless Arabs known as bidoun , and its servants Indian, Sri Lankan and Filipino.

The flight of these foreigners out of occupied Kuwait paralyzed the country as surely as the Iraqi army and left the Kuwaitis with a new sense of vulnerability.

For all the vaunted occupation-bred self-reliance, Kuwaitis quickly learned that they can’t--and don’t want to--do without their foreign workers.

A U.S. soldier visiting a Kuwaiti army base several months after the last Iraqis fled was dismayed to find it littered with trash. The Kuwaiti soldiers told him they were waiting for the “Third World people” to arrive and pick it up.

Vital as the Third World laborers seem, the largest and most politically significant guest-worker group in Kuwait is the Palestinians. And they are also proving the most difficult to replace.

Palestinians have been working in Kuwait since 1938, when a teaching delegation helped open Kuwaiti schools. The Arab-Israeli conflicts of 1948, 1956 and 1967 brought large waves of Palestinian immigrants to Kuwait, where even PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat once did a short stint as a civil engineer.

Kuwait continued to accept Palestinian workers up until the invasion, by which time they numbered about 400,000--compared to between 670,000 and 690,000 Kuwaitis.

Kuwait’s welcome was warm partly because of a national policy of staunch support for the Palestinian cause but also because the Palestinians tended to be highly educated and among the most skilled workers in the Arab world. Moreover, Palestinians had an extremely low crime rate and were considered by the Kuwaitis to pose little security risk, Ibrahim said.

“Even in business, there was very little fraud,” he said. “People trusted the Palestinians.”

Trust changed to shock, then hatred, as Kuwaitis watched Arafat side with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, saw a few Palestinians lead Iraqi soldiers to the homes of Kuwaiti military officers and looked on helplessly when, in rare cases, Palestinian employees helped Iraqis loot businesses that had once employed them.

One of the government’s first moves upon being reinstated in Kuwait was to announce that the foreign work force would be reduced by about half, to about 1 million.

In the tense postwar climate, it was a move clearly aimed at ousting the estimated 170,000 Palestinians who were still in Kuwait when the Iraqis fled in late February; the 230,000 Palestinians believed to have fled during the invasion have not been issued visas to return.

Economists doubt that the government will succeed in reducing Kuwait’s overall population to 1 million to 1.2 million without drastically increasing Kuwaiti participation in the work force or compounding the emirate’s economic catastrophe. Instead, they predict, workers of undesirable nationality will simply be replaced by those from friendly countries.

Iranian workers are suddenly popular again after Kuwait cut off working visas for them during the Iran-Iraq War. A longtime Iranian resident of Kuwait said he was arrested at the airport during the Iran-Iraq War, harassed and fined for having a toy gun. When he returned last spring, the Kuwaiti immigration officer took one look at his passport and said, “Welcome.”

For unskilled labor, Kuwait is looking eastward. Before the Iraqi invasion, at least 375,000 East Asians made up 47% of the work force, and 42,000 Filipinos accounted for another 2%.

Asian workers, thousands of whom fled during the Iraqi occupation, are now pouring back in. One of the enduring questions of postwar Kuwait is whether their treatment will improve.

The Philippine Embassy announced in June that it would place temporary restrictions on hiring housemaids, who would be allowed to work only for high-ranking Kuwaiti officials and diplomats.

“Before the occupation, we encountered a lot of problems with these maids,” explained Lamberto L. Marin, labor attache at the Philippine Embassy in Kuwait city. Marin said 30% of the maids had sought help with employment problems, which ranged from non-payment of wages for up to a year to overwork, as well as rare cases of injuries, molestation and rape.

Most Filipinos fled the country during the occupation, but about 5,000 either stayed voluntarily or were left behind.

“Out of the 10,000 maids we estimate were here before the invasion, almost 2,000 of them were abandoned by their employers,” Marin said. “It is only now that their employers come back to claim them.”

But in labor-starved postwar Kuwait, wages have skyrocketed. Before the invasion, maids earned between $140 and $160 a month, plus room and board, Marin said. Now, they can earn up to $525 a month as cleaners, who are much in demand to repair the ravages of occupation.

“Without foreign workers, we know for a fact that it will be very difficult for Kuwait to accomplish what it wants to accomplish within the time frame because there is not a large enough work force and the Kuwaitis shy away from manual jobs,” Marin said.

“I think they are beginning to appreciate now the value of expatriate workers.”

Saudi Arabian construction companies are also becoming major brokers of Third World labor for Kuwait.

Twaik Esq., one of five Saudi companies that landed large street-sweeping contracts immediately after the Iraqi retreat, arrived March 7 to begin work on a $23.5-million contract to dig a single district of Kuwait city out from under seven months of uncollected garbage and litter. The company has brought in 600 workers from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Egypt, paying them $213 a month to pick up trash, and wants to hire at least 600 more workers as soon as the Kuwaiti government will issue more visas, said Kuwait branch manager Ramadan S. Hajaj.

But so far, the winner in Kuwait’s skilled-labor sweepstakes appears to be Egypt--long the largest Mideast exporter of foreign labor. Egyptians, whose earnings abroad are one of the primary sources of foreign currency for their country’s ailing economy, are being hired in large numbers in Kuwait to replace Palestinian teachers, bankers, managers, doctors and government administrators.

It’s those administrators who worry some Kuwaitis. The skeptics note that Egypt’s bureaucracy is so massive and so inefficient that it has been called “the curse of the Pharaohs.” Moreover, some fear that a large influx of Egyptians, on top of the prewar population of 180,000, could make Egyptians the largest minority group in Kuwait, second in number and political influence only to Kuwaitis.

“I don’t think the Kuwaiti people want more Egyptians because you don’t solve the problem of the Palestinians by creating a new problem of the Egyptians,” said Ibrahim. “In Indira Gandhi’s day, India was going to ask the U.N. to intervene in the United Arab Emirates because of the humiliation of the Indian labor force there. . . , “ he added. “If they have a majority, maybe through the U.N. they can rule the country, if they get the vote there. And Kuwait might have the same thing.”

Murphy reported from Egypt and Efron from Kuwait.