Kuwait should reduce its migrant population, prime minister says
Kuwait should reduce its migrant population to 30 per cent from the current 70 per cent, Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah Al Khalid Al Sabah said as the coronavirus pandemic and a slump in oil prices continue to affect countries across the world.
Foreigners account for nearly 3.4 million of Kuwait’s 4.8 million people.
Sheikh Sabah told the editors of local newspapers that the population had a “big imbalance and we have a future challenge to redress this imbalance”.
Despite running one of the Gulf’s smallest crisis stimulus packages, top lender National Bank of Kuwait predicts the country’s shortfall will reach 40 per cent of gross domestic product in the fiscal year that started on April 1, the most since the First Gulf War and its aftermath.
Sheikh Sabah said Kuwait had to diversify its economy away from its 90 per cent dependence on oil.
He also said two dozen companies had been referred to public prosecutors based on information they broke laws by trading in residency permits, a practice that illegally brings overseas workers into the country and transfers them between employers.
“We are responsible for everyone who lives on this land and the residency trade has exhausted the state and the services in all institutions, especially when dealing with the current situation,” he said.
Sheikh Sabah’s comments follow a renewed push by members of parliament to reduce the number of overseas workers, particularly unskilled labour.
They are proposing a quota system as well as replacing all foreign government employees, estimated to be 100,000 people, with Kuwaitis.
Parliamentary elections are scheduled for later this year, and anti-expatriate rhetoric is attractive to some voters, especially when it concerns wellpaid government jobs.
At the end of last year, only 19 per cent of the Kuwaiti workforce was in the private sector.
Foreigners have accounted for the majority of Kuwait’s Covid-19 cases as the disease spread among migrant workers living in crowded housing conditions.
While Kuwait eased its 24hour restrictions on Sunday, some areas remain under isolation in a bid to stem the outbreak.
Kuwait’s Ministry of Health announced 562 new cases of Covid-19 on Thursday, bringing the number of infections in the country to 29,921.
Six new deaths brought the death toll to 236.
So far, 17,223 people have recovered from the infection.