The Arab world comprises 18 states and was inhabited, in 1980, by more than 150 million people. [1] Two factors vital to economic development—population and oil—are, however, distributed in an extremely uneven manner among these states. The abstract possibility of mutually beneficial cooperation between the population-rich and the oil-rich is not being realized. Instead, we are seeing a process of increased inequality and deterioration in the productive and human resources of the Arab world: first, between the oil-rich and population-rich states; and second, between the Arab world as a whole and the industrialized economies from whom the real wealth of the Arab countries (mediated through oil revenues) is coming.

The tragedy of the Arab world is that the temporary opportunity provided by oil, an opportunity lasting for only a few decades, is being wasted. While the OPEC states have negotiated impressive increases in the price of oil, this apparent progress in the struggle for a new economic order has been largely illusory and has even had some extremely negative consequences. It is illusory because it has enabled the oil-producing states to dispense with the development of internal resources (agriculture, industry, skills and education) and instead to opt for a reliance on the temporary palliatives of oil revenue. It is negative because the demand by the oil-producers for inputs from poorer Third World states, coupled with the shocks to poor Third World economies from the rise in the price of oil, have imposed new burdens on the developing countries that have no oil. Far from assisting their less fortunate fellow states of the Third World to break the bonds of poverty, the oil producers have in fact imposed new relations of exploitation. Nowhere is this pattern of change more evident that in labor migration, a vivid index of the internal and international pattern of socio-economic change promoted by the boom in the OPEC states of the Middle East.

By 1980 over 3 million Arabs had migrated to other states of the Arab world, and an estimated 1.8 million non-Arabs had joined them as labor imported by the oil producers. [2] While not comparable in numbers to the levels of migration into Europe after 1945 (totaling over 15 million), this migration within and to the Arab world has had in some respects even greater effects. In all European labor-importing states, the immigrants have represented a minority of both overall population (the most heavily populated being Switzerland, where 14.5 percent of the population was immigrant in 1981), and those economically active. But the migratory flows in the Arab world have meant that in three states immigrants make up over half of the total population, while in five others, immigrants make up from 40 percent to 75 percent of the economically active population. Moreover, the financial flows from oil producers to labor exporters have created a new pan-Arab economy, within which the states without oil have come to be more and more dependent on the income earned by their exiled citizens. Although these processes date only from the period after 1973, they do enable us to draw some reasonably definite and pessimistic conclusions.

Four Types of Arab World Migration

The novelty of this oil-induced migration of the 1970s should not obscure the fact that, in an historical context, the Arab world has been the site of a variety of migratory flows consequent upon the internationalization of capitalist relations. The first is migration within the states of the region, resulting in the growth of major urban centers where economic and political life are concentrated. In Egypt, Iraq and Sudan, for example, there have been major flows of population into cities that cannot provide either the employment or the social services needed to receive these migrants; the overall pattern in the Arab world is nonetheless for urbanization to grow to meet these needs, especially where the boom associated with oil leads to an expansion of construction and services in urban centers.

This urbanization process has involved larger numbers of migrants than movements from state to state, and it promises to have more uncontrollable political consequences. After all, the Iranian revolution occurred in a situation of rapid migration resulting from the oil boom. It was the first major Third World revolution to take place almost completely in the cities.

The second variety of migration is that from the Arab world to other countries. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the most evident of these was the emigration of Lebanese, nearly all of them Christians, to North and South America and, to a lesser extent, to East Africa and some cities in Europe. [3] At the same time, but less visibly, there was a substantial emigration of inhabitants of the South Arabian region known as Hadramawt to Southeast Asia and East Africa where they too formed merchant communities. Throughout the first part of this century, there was a flow of migration from both North and South Yemen to the ports of Europe and North America, where they formed semi-permanent communities that later became involved in new forms of employment, as industrial workers in the British Midlands and as fruit pickers in California. [4] Since World War II, migration from the Arab world has formed part of the wider flow of Third World labor to western Europe. 850,000 Algerians, 250,000 Moroccans and 60,000 Tunisians settled in France. In all, Arabs have made up nearly 10 percent of the post-war migrant labor flow to western Europe.

The third type of migration has been from one Arab state to another. Prior to the 1970s, there were many smaller cross-currents of migration resulting from commerce, nomadism, family links and pilgrimages. The demands of seasonal agriculture in Egypt and Lebanon produced migrant flows from, respectively, Sudan and Syria. While numerically small in comparison with what was to occur in the 1970s, this earlier history nonetheless provided a framework for viewing migration as a normal phenomenon. As a result of the oil boom, the known level of inter-Arab migration rose to over 3 million by the end of the decade, and may even have been much higher given the very substantial but quite undocumented flow of migrants to Iraq.

For some countries, such as North and South Yemen, these migrants represented enormous reductions in the numbers of the domestic labor force; for both countries, these emigration figures represent a quarter or more of all able-bodied male adults. But, as we shall see, the qualitative drain was even greater and represented a major weakening of these states’ development potential.

If the main motive for migration was the attractiveness of higher incomes, certain political factors were also important. The case of the Palestinians is the most obvious example. As a result of the establishment of Israel, 1.5 million Palestinians were exiled in other Arab states and then moved on to form major communities in the oil- producing states. In Kuwait, a Palestinian community of up to 300,000 formed the most important immigrant component. [5] Politics in the form of traditional autocracy and stagnant economic conditions also played their part in smaller migrations; the flow of Yemenis from the North in the 1950s, and of Omanis during the rule of Sa‘id bin Taymur are examples. While the causes of these political migrations were clearly different, the effects—a net flow to the oil states—were similar.

The fourth type of migration is that from outside the Arab world to the Arab states. Several varieties of this have been seen in modern times. As a part of the larger phenomenon of global migration from metropolis to colony, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the settling of colonies through trans-Mediterranean migration. This involved settlement by Europeans in the arc of countries running from Morocco to Palestine. The Palestinian colonization by Zionist settlers was distinct in its motivation and character, but not initially in its effects. Yet it was the only one that established a permanent new social entity: with a few exceptions, the European colonizers of Egypt and Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco all had to return northwards in the face of local nationalism. In migratory terms, Israel is less anomalous than it might at first appear, but it has itself in recent years become a net exporter of population—up to 10 percent of its population has emigrated to Europe and North America even as other flows, especially from the USSR, continue to move in its direction.

Another form of migration into the Arab world is that by people of Arab descent, themselves fleeing the rise of nationalism in Asia and Africa; the Hadramis from Southeast Asia, the Omanis from Zanzibar, and the Yemenis from Ethiopia and Vietnam all fall into this category. While not so numerically significant, the Arab returnees have had two noticeable effects. First, they have aroused feelings in the Arab world about what is seen as the mistreatment of Arabs abroad. [6] Secondly, they have provided a supply of Arabs with higher levels of education and experience. The most significant recent flow of migrants into the Arab world is the migration, for limited periods, of South and Southeast Asians, as well as Far Easterners, for work on sites in the oil states. [7] Before 1975 this was an insignificant trend, except for the Indians and Pakistanis who for decades had played a role as intermediary clerks and managers in the Persian Gulf. Between 1975 and 1979 the number of Far Eastern workers in the Arab states rose from 15,000 to 160,000. In 1981 alone, 150,000 Pakistanis went to work in the Arab oil states; there were 800,000 Asians working in Saudi Arabia compared to only 38,000 in 1975. Some projections suggest that by the mid-1980s South Asian and Far Eastern labor will have overtaken Arab labor as the importing states seek more highly skilled and less politically menacing forms of labor.

Projections for the 1980s indicate that these levels of migrant labor participation in the economies of the oil-producing states will continue, although no systematic evaluation of the impact of the current decline in oil revenues on migrant labor is available. Assuming the “low economic growth” projections of a recently published World Bank study, the major labor importers in the Arab world will have a total labor force of 5.8 million, of which only 46 percent will be locally provided. [8]

Consequences in the Labor-Importing States

Four major consequences of this flow to the eight Arab oil producers can be identified. The first follows from the fact that oil in itself generates almost no employment. The employment which these migrants take up is not in the oil industry, but in activities promoted by the states which receive oil revenues; and the main expansion consequent upon the increased price of oil is in construction and in services. There has been a dangerous neglect of agriculture, and industrial development has been restricted to a few capital-intensive enterprises.

The second consequence of these migrant flows for the oil producers follows from this; the boom is bound to be temporary, since oil is a limited resource and the activities encouraged by oil revenues are reliant upon the transient benefit of such funds. Therefore, unlike the migration to North America in the ninteenth century or to western Europe in the post-war epoch, this migration to the oil states cannot result in a permanent transfer of labor.

It is the third consequence of the migration flow, which is the most immediate and striking—the very high proportions of the work force and even of the total population made up by migrants. In Kuwait, Qatar and the Emirates, the migrants comprise more than half of the total population, and in four other Arab oil producers of the Middle East, immigrants make up over one third of the labor force. Oman and Algeria are, despite their oil revenues, relatively deprived countries which still suffer from substantial underemployment of local labor. Bahrain is a country which, albeit in microcosm, has begun to exhibit some of the features of the post-oil economy. Its social services and industry are the result of five decades of oil production, but it can only sustain these because of the supply of gas and oil from neighboring Saudi Arabia.

This unique proportional weight of migrants, coupled with the transience of the oil boom, leads to a fourth consequence within the oil states—the systematic segregation of the migrants from the political and social lives of the countries where they work. Oil is itself a classic instance of an enclave economy, but the non-oil projects upon which the migrants work are also segregated, often physically, by being located on work sites separated from the rest of the population. In none of these states except Iraq are the same social services proffered to migrants as to citizens. [9] Restrictive citizenship laws apply in all of these states. Migrants have no legal protection, no political rights, and no rights to organize, publish or strike. Like serfs or slaves, they are usually tied to one particular employer and the Saudi press is replete with advertisements by contractors publishing the details of migrant laborers who have fled from their place of work. These restrictions apply less to those communities involved in trade and government service. Migrant white-collar workers, whether Palestinians in Kuwait, or Indians or Pakistanis in other peninsular societies, tend not to be segregated in quite this way; but they too are denied access to the social and political rights which the native inhabitants of the oil-producing countries enjoy.

Among the indigenous inhabitants of the oil producers, there has been considerable hostility to the migrant flow. In Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, certain jobs have been restricted to citizens of the countries concerned. In Oman, the promotion of migration is seen by political opponents of the regime as a means of avoiding the creation of an indigenous working class. [10] Attempts by the left-wing legal opposition in Kuwait to loosen the conditions of citizenship have been defeated; there has, if anything, been a trend toward greater restrictions on what forms of work migrants can do, or where they can live. [11] Deportation of illegal immigrants is very common: 18,000 were expelled in this way from Kuwait in 1980 alone.

Perhaps the most important response within the oil-producing countries is a less visible one: the erosion, through access to oil revenues and migrant labor, of work motivation in the indigenous population. The concept of a “labor shortage” is a rather relative one, especially in a society where widespread illiteracy and the seclusion of women keep much of the potential local labor force off the market. Now the seduction of oil incomes has compounded the problem, so that even in a country like Iraq, with a population of 14 million, much of the menial construction work is being done by imported labor. In ministries and businesses local citizens earn salaries but many observers question whether much work is done. [12]

Response on the part of the migrants themselves is less easy to gauge and has not been adequately studied. Coming as single men, for limited periods, the migrants earn a sum of money and send most of it home. The newly arrived workers are separated not just from the indigenous population, but also from other migrants, by location and language. The result is that, on the surface, there has been remarkably little resistance by migrants to the conditions in which they find themselves.

Yet this appearance is not wholly accurate. First, there have been a number of reports of migrants staging opposition in the oil producing states—strikes by Koreans in Saudi Arabia, clashes of Indians with their employers in Oman. [13] Before the boom of the 1970s, Palestinians played an important part in organizing the first strikes in the Saudi oil fields (in the 1950s), and Yemenis have been involved in much of the opposition activities in Saudi Arabia, whether in the underground nationalist movement of the 1960s or in the seizure of the Mecca mosque in 1979.

The apparent political passivity of migrants is, however, deceptive for another reason. A migrant faces a choice—to organize politically with reference to the country of employment, or with reference to the country of origin. Even where political activity is possible in the country of employment, migrants may devote a considerable part of their energies and finance to the issues of their home country. This is even more common in the case of the oil states, given the fact that most migrants will eventually leave. Palestinians in the Arabian Peninsula actively support the PLO. In the 1960s Omani migrants in the Gulf founded an underground Dhofar Liberation Front which in 1965 began a guerrilla war against the British-backed sultan. [14] Migrants from North and South Yemen are organized into government-backed associations through which they keep in touch with their countries of origin and participate in development projects at home. Even when migrants come from countries where they have participated in strong political and trade union organizations (such as India), they seem to prefer to orient themselves to their homelands rather than to the country where they are working as migrants. How long this apparent political quiescence will last is uncertain, and the tensions attendant upon the migratory process, combined with the impact of the Iranian revolution, may lead to greater and more overt conflict in the future.

There has been significant opposition in a few oil-producing countries from organized groups within the indigenous working populations. For example, there exists a strong underground trade union movement in Bahrain, centered in the refineries and the aluminum smelting plants, and there have been strikes in both Kuwait and the Emirates by citizens working as government employees. Whether and how such movements could ever incorporate migrants is unclear; nor is it evident how far the transnational appeals of radical Islam will be able to mobilize different groups of workers and employees more successfully than the appeals of nationalism and socialism in earlier decades.

Consequences in the Labor-Exporting Countries

The most evident result of the migration to oil-producing states is the flow of remittances back to the country of origin, a process much stronger than in most other migratory processes because the migrants are nearly all men who have left their families at home. Inter-Arab remittances were calculated to be nearly $3 billion in 1980. The real transfers may well be higher than the cash figures indicate, since some of the migrants’ income is sent home in kind. [15] Provisional remittance data for 1981 point to a possible downward or leveling trend in remittances.

Theoretical literature on migration indicates that, under appropriate conditions, labor migration can have positive effects for the labor-exporting countries. [16] Most apparent are the following four benefits: first, the remittances can become a source of investment capital directed toward developing productive resources; secondly, the migrants can acquire skills and experience abroad which, on their return, can enrich the human resources of their home country; thirdly, the flow of labor from overpopulated and underemployed populations can lead to a rise in labor productivity and in initiative; fourthly, by reducing the available supply of labor it should lessen pressure on land and on social services. The argument here is rather similar to one regarding private foreign investment in Third World countries; it can have mutually beneficial effects, provided the terms of the relationship are controlled in the Third World country concerned. In practice, no such control has been exercised in the majority of labor-exporting states.

Evidence from a range of countries regarding the disposal of workers’ remittances indicates that very little goes into productive investment. Most is used to purchase consumption goods (many of them imported), and to speculate in land purchases. [17] Similarly, skill acquisition is a dubious phenomenon (even in the case of migrants arriving in Western Europe) because unskilled work tends to be allocated to migrants. In the oil-producing states there is no infrastructure for such training, and there can be very few migrants who have learned anything from their time in these states. In Saudi Arabia, for example, as the demand for skilled labor increases, the government’s policy is to turn to other sources of supply (the Far East and South Asia), rather than train unskilled Arabs from North Yemen or Egypt. The third possible consequence, an increase in productivity and innovation, like the fourth, reduced pressure on services and land, presupposes that the amount of out-migration is sufficient to make a marked difference for the country concerned. In the cases of North and South Yemen, for example, this has been so, although not to the optimistic extent suggested by orthodox theory. In others, such as Egypt, Sudan and the countries of the Asian subcontinent, the scale of out-migration has been quantitatively insignificant in domestic terms, though large in terms of the importing states.

Other consequences of migration have been more serious, especially for the labor-exporting states. First, the oil states have succeeded in attracting skilled personnel who are in short supply in their own countries; these include teachers, doctors, building craftsmen, managers and engineers. The “brain drain” from Third World to first world economies applies even more devastatingly here for a wide range of skills called for by the oil-producing countries. [18] Despite lack of personnel for rural health clinics, doctors have been leaving. A survey of Jordan in 1977 showed that two thirds of all engineers, half of the agricultural engineers, a third of the doctors and half of the nurses had left the country, as had a third of all graduates of secondary, vocational and teachers’ training schools. [19] This picture is repeated in the other labor-exporting states.

A second serious consequence for the labor-exporting states is that the inflow of remittances helps to depress rather than promote their local production, by encouraging the importation of foreign goods and, more specifically, the importation of food over produce from home agriculture. The effects on agriculture in countries such as Sudan and North Yemen have been extremely negative. In North Yemen, imported wheat is cheaper than the locally produced variety because of the rise in agricultural wages.

Thirdly, by stimulating demand for limited supplies of land and by raising wages, remittances have provoked widespread inflation in some of the labor-exporting states. The overall effect of labor export has therefore been to depress local production, to reduce—through the loss of large numbers of skilled personnel—the countries’ capacities to develop their own economies, and to increase dependency on external sources of finance, sources which are, at best, fluctuating and impossible to sustain.

There are exceptions: Algeria and South Yemen have tried to create conditions in which the positive effects of migration are realized. Algeria banned further emigration in 1973, and in the three subsequent years 60,000 of the 850,000 Algerians living in France returned home. [20] A government campaign of “reinsertion” was organized, to enable the returning migrants to bring their possessions with them and to find comparable employment. However, the difficulty of sustaining incomes comparable to those enjoyed abroad, combined with the prevalence of widespread unemployment in Algeria itself, have limited the impact of this program.

In South Yemen, the government has sought to subject the migratory process to strict state controls. [21] About 100,000 South Yemenis work abroad, mainly in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and in 1974 all further emigration was banned. At the same time, measures were taken to ensure the permanent return of migrants, or even to promote their participation, while working abroad, in the development programs of the country. Information programs on changes at home were organized; migrants sending foreign exchange home were offered higher rates of interest if they deposited these monies in the National Bank; workers from particular areas were encouraged to support construction of schools, hospitals and roads in those same home districts; marriage laws were altered to make it possible for women to divorce men who stayed away for more than three years and illegitimacy was abolished, thus enabling migrants to bring back children they had fathered abroad. As a result, remittances rose from a 1973 level of $33 million to a 1978 figure of $258 million, or over 60 percent of all imports. The South Yemenis presented migration in political terms, as a scourge, a product of the underdevelopment of their country, a phenomenon that economic development could solve. But they too have found it difficult to attract back these migrants accustomed to the wages of the oil-producing states, and the consumer goods so readily available there. At the same time, the ban on further migration created considerable resentment in a country where incomes were many times lower than in the oil-producing regions nearby in the Arabian Peninsula.

New Links of Exploitation

Although mass migration to the oil states from other Arab countries has been in progress for less than a decade, it is already evident that this is having a negative impact on the labor exporting states, states also hit by the higher price of OPEC oil. The negative impact can be adduced to three factors. The first of these centers on features associated with all capitalist development: namely, the unequal distribution of income and wealth, and the new links of exploitation which the “new economic order” involves. The very closing of the gap between the industrialized and oil-producing states under conditions of capitalist production has had as a necessary counterpart, the forging of new relationships of inequality between the oil producers of the Third World and the poorer, oil importing states of the Third World. Secondly, there are the consequences of economic development based on oil: the lack of any major development of agricultural and industrial potential, the transient nature of the boom itself, and the unskilled and short-term projects into which many Arab migrants are directed. To these can be added the particular social and political features of the main oil producers—countries ruled by various forms of political dictatorship, monarchical and republican, and ones where elementary vocational services and social rights are not provided. Thirdly, there is the reluctance or outright refusal of the labor-exporting states to manage the process in such a way as to draw benefit from the migratory flow; with the partial exception of Algeria and South Yemen, the states exporting labor have allowed market forces to prevail or have used migration as a means of acquiring the capital with which to sustain otherwise unviable economic systems.

The lessons of this migration to the oil states suggest that the negotiation of new terms of trade with the industrialized world and the expansion of intra-Third World economic contacts cannot, on their own, provide the solution to the problems of the Third World. Even where such a “new economic order” is created, it will, under capitalist relations of production, reproduce the exploitation and rapacity seen already in north-south relations. The central question is not, therefore, whether a new order can be created. Rather, it is whether the social relations of the new order would be the same as those of the old, or whether a new underlying set of productive and social relationships (not just new terms of trade) can be constituted.

Endnotes

[1] In addition to the Arab League, Somalia, Djibouti and Mauritania. Since these are not countries in which the majority of the population speak Arabic as a first language, they have been excluded from this survey; of these three, only Somalia sends significant numbers of migrants to the oil states. A fourth Arab country, Palestine, has more than 3 million inhabitants distributed between areas of Israeli occupation and exile in neighboring Arab countries.
[2] The standard work on Arab migration is J. S. Birks and C. A. Sinclair, Arab Manpower (London: Croom Helm, 1980), the results of which have been given further diffusion by the authors in a variety of other articles and specialist papers. A pioneering attempt to provide a context for analyzing the migration process is found in Roger Owen, “The Arab Economies in the 1970s,” MERIP Reports 100-101 (October-December 1981). For further elaboration of points raised in this paper see Fred Halliday, “Labor Migration in the Middle East,” MERIP Reports 59 (August 1977).
[3] Those of Lebanese descent form the main component of what is now an Arab-American community of up to 2 million members. Considerable numbers of Egyptians, Palestinians and Iraqis have migrated to the US in the past two decades. See Barbara Aswad, ed., Arabic-Speaking Communities in American Cities (Englewood, NJ: Jerome S. Ozer Publishing for Center for Migration Studies, 1974).
[4] On Yemeni migration see Jon C. Swanson, Emigration and Economic Development: The Case of the Yemen Arab Republic (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979); Nabeel Abraham, “Detroit’s Yemeni Workers,” MERIP Reports 57 (May 1977); and Fred Halliday, Arab Immigrant Communities in Britain (forthcoming).
[5] Bilal al-Hasan, al-Filastiniyyun fi al-Kuwait (Beirut: PLO Research Center, 1974).
[6] The hostility of Arab oil states to Tanzania, to which they have been reluctant to give economic aid, results from continuing resentment at the massacre of Zanzibari Arabs in the uprising of 1963.
[7] J. S. Birks and C. A. Sinclair, “Economic and Social Implications of Current Development in the Arab Gulf: The Oriental Connection,” in Tim Niblock, ed., Social and Economic Development in the Arab Gulf (London: Croom Helm, 1980).
[8] The importing states are Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Libya, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman. Iraq is not included. Ismail Serageldin, James Socknat, Stace Birks, Bob Li and Clive Sinclair, Manpower and International Labor Migration in the Middle East and North Africa (Washington, DC: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1983), Table 4-1, p. 26.
[9] The Iraqi government’s official policy is that it welcomes all Arabs who want to work in its economy and that they are entitled to the same health and other social services as Iraqi citizens. How far this is applied in practice to the mainly Egyptian immigrant community is not known. Importing of Arabs goes together with a systematic expulsion of Iraqis of Iranian origin, many of whom have, during times of Iraqi-Iranian conflict, been arbitrarily forced across the Iranian frontier. A deliberate policy of racial homogenization is underway here.
[10] See for example the headline “Al-‘amal lil-ajanib wa al-batala lil-muwatinin” (“Work for Foreigners and Unemployment for the Local Inhabitants”) in Sawt al-Thawra (the weekly paper of the banned People’s Front for the Liberation of Oman), February 1, 1981. Around the same period the Front published the program of a National Committee of Oman Workers in which it called for limitations on the import of foreign labor, priority for employment of Omanis, and vocational training for the Omani work force. Oman wa al-Thawra 3/2 (February 1981).
[11] Le Monde, June 26, 1981.
[12] See Yusuf Sayigh, The Economies of the Arab World (London: Croom Helm, 1978), pp. 180ff, for a discussion on the erosion of the willingness to work.
[13] On the Korean strike, see MERIP Reports 61 (October 1977); on Indians in Oman, see Guardian (London), February 14, 1978.
[14] See Fred Halliday, Arabia without Sultans (London: Penguin Books, 1974), ch. 10. By contrast, it seems that Indian migrants, many of them from the state of Kerala where the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is in power, tend to lose contact with the political organizations at home. (CPI-M General Secretary, E. M. S. Namboodiripad interview held in New Delhi, November 1980.)
[15] Roger Owen states that nearly a quarter of Egyptian remittances in the 1980-1981 period were repatriated in kind.
[16] For a discussion of theories of migration and its possible benefits, see Stephen Castles and Godula Kosack, Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), ch. 9; Suzanne Paine, Exporting Workers: The Turkish Case (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974); and Jon Swanson.
[17] For North Yemen, see Swanson; for Turkey, see Paine.
[18] Birks and Sinclair, Arab Manpower, p. 218.
[19] International Herald Tribune, November 25, 1977. For Pakistan, see Feroz Ahmed, “Pakistan: The New Dependence,” Race and Class 18/1 (Summer 1976).
[20] Le Monde, August 2, 1977; Birks and Sinclair, Arab Manpower, pp. 201-202.
[21] M. Ghalib, South Yemeni Foreign Ministry official responsible for policy on emigrants, interviewed in Aden, December 1977.

How to cite this article:

Fred Halliday "Labor Migration in the Arab World," Middle East Report 123 (May 1984).

For 50 years, MERIP has published critical analysis of Middle Eastern politics, history, and social justice not available in other publications. Our articles have debunked pernicious myths, exposed the human costs of war and conflict, and highlighted the suppression of basic human rights. After many years behind a paywall, our content is now open-access and free to anyone, anywhere in the world. Your donation ensures that MERIP can continue to remain an invaluable resource for everyone.

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