Kuwait Urged to Open Gates to Foreigners

Mohammed al Gharib is a subversive--an unwitting one, that is.

A small shopkeeper in the center of Kuwait City, he has a financial stake in overturning government policy on population.

“The reason the market’s so depressed is that there aren’t enough people. They have to let foreign workers bring in their families,” he said.

Mohammed Hadi al Awadi, chairman of a medium-sized real estate company, agrees.

“The government has to take rapid and decisive action to stabilize the situation in the property market,” he said in his company’s annual report. “It must relax the procedures for immigrant workers to encourage them to come to the country.”

The drive against the government’s policy of minimizing the number of foreign residents, a byproduct of the Iraqi invasion in 1990, goes beyond the private business community.

The state-owned oil producing company is busy recruiting staff abroad, to the dismay of Kuwaiti workers who fear that foreign competition will undermine their prospects for promotion and further training.

Even the average Kuwaiti citizen, typically a civil servant on a comfortable salary with generous fringe benefits, is not at ease with attempts to substitute Kuwaitis for foreigners.

“Some jobs which require a certain effort cannot be transferred to Kuwaitis, at least for the time being,” Rashed al Radaan wrote in the newspaper Sawt al Kuwait.

Radaan said that when they tried substituting Kuwaitis for foreigners in the government department that delivers legal summonses, the result was chaos.

“Kuwaiti employees are not prepared to wander the length and breadth of the country knocking on doors,” he said.

There is a lobby to keep the government to the low-population position it adopted after liberation from Iraqi forces last year, but it is less vocal. Incoming foreign workers have already tipped the balance against a Kuwaiti majority.

In January, Ahmed Jassar, then planning minister, said Kuwait had a little over 1 million residents, 60% of them Kuwaitis. The prewar population was about 2.2 million.

His successor, Finance and Planning Minister Nassir Rawdan, said that Kuwaitis now make up less than 45% of a population of about 1.35 million.

The effects of the population shrinkage are everywhere.

Some quarters of Kuwait City are practically deserted; the government says there are 46,000 empty apartments. Many restaurants have not reopened since the invasion, and the banks are suffering from a shortage of customers.

Ahmed Bishara, a management consultant and political activist, said, “Everybody pays lip service to the official position, but they are not willing to do what it takes. Sometimes they don’t think of the implications.”

The implications are that privileged citizens of a wealthy country might have to do menial tasks like sweep the streets, wait in restaurants and learn how to fix their cars.

“You’re asking the impossible if you expect them to put on blue overalls and work in a factory,” Bishara said.

A paper prepared by the Ministry of Planning suggests that the government is beginning to look at the implications.

It lists eight ways the authorities might keep the population low, such as by making Kuwaitis work longer hours and by abandoning attempts to develop industry and agriculture, which largely depend on imported labor.

It notes that one aspect of current policy, restricting the number of foreigners who can bring their families, could create a society in which most non-Kuwaitis are bachelors.