Saudi Arabia and its labourers: Go home, but who will replace you? | The Economist

Saudi Arabia and its labourers: Go home, but who will replace you? | The Economist:

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MILLIONS of pious pilgrims flock to Mecca every year, but the Muslim holy city’s newest, biggest hotel serves a different clientele. Just months after opening, the Shumeisi Deportation Centre already holds more than 20,000 Egyptians, Ethiopians, Indonesians, Yemenis and citizens of other nationalities, nearly half of them women. They will not be there for long. Nearly all will soon be packed off home, joining an exodus that has seen perhaps one in ten of Saudi Arabia’s estimated 9m foreign workers leave the kingdom in little more than a year.

The number awaiting deportation has swollen dramatically. An amnesty meant to allow migrant workers to conform to new, stricter employment rules expired on November 4th. Since then, Saudi police have mounted sweeps of worksites and the districts where foreigners live. Thousands have turned themselves in voluntarily, some camped out in public, luggage in hand, awaiting arrest and a free flight home. But others prefer to resist: on November 10th two people died when a police raid targeting Ethiopian residents of a slum in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, sparked a minor riot."

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