Special to WorldTribune.com

ABU DHABI — The Gulf Cooperation Council has been flooded by foreigners.

A senior GCC official said the six Gulf Arab states were threatened by millions of foreigners. The official said the foreigners, most of them laborers, were establishing private economies.

“The growth of such an economy is bound to cause huge problems in the future,” former Bahraini Labor Minister Majid Al Alawi said.

In a television appearance in mid-November 2013, Al Alawi said the foreign presence was changing the environment throughout the region. He said
foreigners have sponsored office towers as well as private islands in the Gulf.

“The presence of a high number of foreigners took a dangerous dimension
a decade ago with the mushrooming of projects to have high-rise buildings
and create amazing and strange islands,” Al Alawi said. “Many foreigners
have come, have settled here and, in the process, have set up their own
private economy.”

The Bahraini minister, speaking amid riots by foreigners in neighboring Saudi Arabia, said expatriates were not involved in the GCC economies. Instead, they were involved in such services as laundry, rentals and cellular phones.

“It is a private economy by and for the foreigners settling here,” Al
Alawi said.

Al Alawi said foreigners have been moving steadily into GCC states since
the 1970s. Over the last decade, he said, the flow of the foreigners in the
region intensified.

“We do support the rights of foreigners, but we need to be aware that
the presence of more than 15 million expatriates in the Gulf countries is a
serious threat to the local demography,” Al Alawi said. “Such a huge number
is also a security threat.”

The International Monetary Fund agreed. In a report, IMF warned that the
GCC, with an increasing youth population, faced rising unemployment unless
it controlled the influx of cheap foreign labor, which dominates 80 percent
of the market. Several GCC states, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have
reported unemployment of between 12 and 14 percent.

“With a rapidly rising youth population, private-sector job creation for
GCC nationals has become a challenge and unemployment could rise in the
coming years unless more nationals find jobs in the private sector,” the IMF
said on Nov. 20. “Allowing a more competitive labor market could help
gradually raise the wages of foreign workers and make low-skilled nationals
more attractive to employers.”

  Foreign influx to Gulf states takes on ‘dangerous dimension’ as laborers forge own economies, Gulf Cooperation Council, International Monetary Fund, Majid Al Alawi