After the end of the dream of working in the Gulf .. These countries that the Egyptians want to leave

Mahmoud Seddik-Cairo

For decades, Egyptians have established a culture that has made it a dream to travel to work in the Gulf states, but this culture seems to be changing as a result of the rapid economic and legal measures taken by the Gulf states to absorb foreign workers, and forced some to return home, while others think of The same step.

The recent period has witnessed reverse displacement of large numbers of Egyptians and their families, either after the forced termination of their work by employers, or the realization that their salaries after the high cost of living and new taxes and fees are not worth the trouble of alienation.

The crisis has been aggravated by the lack of job opportunities in Iraq for years, which was previously a target for Egyptian workers, as well as Libya, where some statistics estimated the number of Egyptian workers before 2015 by more than two million, most of them returned due to armed operations there.

Do Egyptians stop traveling to work abroad, or will Egypt's worsening economic situation change them? What are the most important countries they are thinking of traveling to in search of a living?

Are forced to return
Ali Hamed, a returnee from Saudi Arabia last year and now a driver with Uber, expressed his shock since he went to the kingdom. After paying a large sum to an employment agency, he could not afford living and working conditions for more than eight months and decided to return.

"I went to work as an accountant in one of the transport companies there, but I found myself paying a fee of about 20% of my salary, which does not exceed two thousand riyals, in addition to the treatment that the managers of the company began to treat us," Hamed told Al Jazeera Net. When I asked a Saudi colleague about the secret of the transaction, he told me that the company pays a large monthly fee for expatriates who are over Saudis.

"I decided to go back immediately. I felt I could save no real and I would go home empty-handed as I came. I said to myself," The scourge is better than waiting for it, because sooner or later they will have to leave, as all workers of all nationalities in the company talk. And we were reading about the thousands of workers who are laid off by the Kingdom every now and then. "

Reverse migration
Alaa al-Mohandes, the owner of one of the companies to recruit workers abroad, expected the return of large numbers of Gulf countries in the light of the economic crises that besieged it, and set an example in Saudi Arabia as it was absorbing about three million Egyptian workers, representing up to half the number of Egyptian workers in all Arab countries combined He stressed that the size of the Egyptian labor will not exceed 1.5 million next year.

Speaking to Al Jazeera Net, the engineer pointed to the austerity economic measures taken by Saudi Arabia to reduce expenses and increase sources of funding, including the introduction of fees that did not exist on the workers residing in them, and the imposition of so-called Saudization on 12 professions in the Kingdom of which almost no expatriate, and get rid of those who were working Before the decision.

In the coming periods, Egypt will witness significant reverse migration from the Gulf, and these countries will witness a severe shortage of labor, given the sharp decline in demand for Egyptian labor and the policies of countries to localize their local labor.

Hamdi Emam, head of the Department of Employment Placement Companies of the Chamber of Commerce in Cairo, estimated that the demand for Egyptian workers in the Gulf countries has dropped to 80%, after reaching an earlier period of six million workers.

Imam said in a press statement that this decline amounts to 90% of the demand for high and medium qualifications, and 70% for doctors and engineers, and the required occupations were limited to technical labor such as refrigeration, air conditioning, electricity and plumbers.

Alternative labor markets
On the possibility of alternative labor markets for the Gulf for Egyptians, says Mahmoud Abu Khalil, owner of an exchange company in Giza that there are promising African markets in the demand for labor, especially countries that need infrastructure such as Rwanda, Ghana, South Africa and Nigeria, but there is an Asian market in countries that are economically strong Like South Korea, Malaysia, and even Japan, which passed a law at the end of last year allowing more foreign workers to fill a large shortage of Japanese workers.

But the problem - according to the words of Abu Khalil to the island Net - that those countries demand employment of different quality from those that were going to the Gulf, these countries require skilled technical labor, which holds the Division of the recruitment of overseas workers to prepare training programs that qualify Egyptian workers to the requirements of the new Asian and African markets.

Abu Khalil added that the Division of Employment Placement Companies affiliated to the Cairo Chamber of Commerce organized a conference entitled "Qualification and Training for Employment" under the auspices of the Minister of Manpower Mohamed Saafan and the companies to recruit workers abroad. This trend as described.

He explained that many Egyptians preempted these trends and closed the gates of the Gulf and European countries in their faces, to go to African countries such as Senegal, Uganda, Kenya and South Africa, where they travel on a tourist visa for three months that allow the authorities of those countries to renew it for a similar period, but they are eventually forced to circumvent the laws of these States to extend the period of residence, which is signed under the penalty of law.

Returnees from Uganda's prisons
Faraj A. is one of the returnees from Uganda, after the Egyptian authorities intervened with the government there to release 36 Egyptians arrested for violating the laws of the country. Only 14 of them were released from one village in Kafr el-Sheikh governorate north of Cairo.

Faraj tells Al Jazeera Net that he and his colleagues were doing jobs similar to the salespeople who pass through the houses, each carrying his household goods on a cart and passing through the houses knocking on their doors to display the goods to the homeowners.

He explained that this is contrary to Ugandan laws, so they eventually fell into the hands of the authorities, some of whom had forged papers and passports to facilitate the residence, and the Ugandan authorities refused to extradite them to Egypt.

The Foreign Employment Enrollment Division at the Cairo Chamber of Commerce estimated the number of workers returning at around 500,000 workers, half of whom returned from Saudi Arabia only, out of five million who obtained work permits from the Egyptian Ministry of Manpower.