RIYADH (AFP)
Saudi Arabia's labor minister said Riyadh supports a residency limit on the millions of foreign workers in the Gulf to prevent them from gaining a political voice in the oil-rich region, in remarks published on Monday.
"We do not want the day to come when we are forced to allow the (foreign) workers to be represented in our parliaments or municipal councils," Ghazi al-Gosaibi told the Arabic-language economic daily Al-Eqtisadiah.
He said he feared that international pressure would in the future force states in the region to enfranchise expatriate workers.
Saudi Arabia is a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) along with Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.
Foreign workers make up about 13 million or 37 percent of the 35 million population in these six Muslim states. They come mainly from the Asian sub-continent and are relied upon heavily as labor to drive the booming economies of the bloc.
Gosaibi did not specify how long expatriate workers should be allowed to work in the GCC.
But Bahrain's Labor Minister Majeed al-Alawi said in an interview last year that he supported a six-year residency cap, fearing expatriate workers were eroding the national character of states in the Gulf. |
