KEEP quiet and ponder … Who will raise our children, cook our food, and keep our clothes neat if the expatriates leave? Unfortunately, the notion of blaming others is always ready. Hence, in every crisis we pin all our problems on expatriates.

We then adopt improvised decisions and laws without contemplating the negatives, and the risks of such negatives on the country’s economic and social conditions. Those with sterile visions failed to develop a clear strategy for the traffic situation that will serve the country for half a century in the future, and instead fixed the problem by denying driving licenses to expatriates. The crisis of medical treatment and waste has suddenly become the responsibility of the expatriates. The scarcity of medicines should not be pinned on the expatriate, but it is the Kuwaiti’s mistake for giving him his civil ID card in order to obtain the medicines.

We suffer from ill planning, but we still blame the expatriates. To be frank and without any flattery, can we work in the fields of carpentry, steel, electricity, bakeries, and even in laundries? We spend more than half an hour dressing up, pouring perfumes and incense, and making sure we are neat, so will we work on paving roads and in the construction field? Prior to the discovery of oil, the early Kuwaitis indeed worked. We also worked during the Iraqi invasion.

However, how many of those remained steadfast inside? Did we continue to work in the professions that were imposed on us after the liberation? Gentlemen, why this bluff and failure to bear responsibility for the crime committed by a group of Kuwaitis including human traffickers who brought in tens of thousands of workers and threw them on the streets, and those who do not have mercy and do not allow Allah’s mercy to descend on humans?

It is true that there are about one million four hundred thousand Kuwaitis who are served by three million expatriates. But unless we realize that they are an added value to the national economy similar to the case in the Gulf countries and the world, we would know that the problem is not with them but with us.

It is because we want someone to serve us, while at the same time, we mistreat that person. If Kuwaitis do not want this soft invasion, as some say, then let everyone be kind, abandon the domestic workers, and clean our homes ourselves. Isn’t the high wages of construction workers, price inflation and the increase in the cost of construction due to our expulsion of skilled labor from whom other Gulf countries have benefited?

Our fault is that we babble with irrational words, and blame others. The percentage of Qataris out of the total population of Qatar is 12 percent, or about 300,000. Was it possible to implement the modern infrastructure and organize the World Cup in Qatar without the expatriates?

Who established the infrastructure in the UAE, in which the percentage of citizens is about nine percent? Would it have enjoyed this thriving economy without expatriates? The same applies to the largest Gulf country - the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Who helped in its prosperity?

While the UAE provides all those who enter it with all means of comfort, attracts them with huge projects, and gives them everything that would make them spend their money in that country and move its economy, in Kuwait they live in a bottle of racism. Let us look at the rest of the countries of the world where migrant labor is the main engine of the economy.

They include Germany, France, Britain, Switzerland and the United States as well as the countries close to us and similar to us in everything. Let us think about what we have become as a result of our different ideas on which we base our decisions.

Unfortunately, we imagine ourselves to be an empire on which the sun does not set, as was the case with the English people nearly a hundred years ago, and that the inhabitants of our land must serve us. The British today work side by side with the expatriates who changed the nature of society and developed it. This is why we have to think realistically, and fear Allah for ourselves and our countr

By Ahmed Al-Jarallah
Editor-in-Chief, the Arab Times

Email: [email protected]
[email protected]