Expat Phobia Written by : Badrya Darwish Quoted from KuwaitTimes Why do we suffer from expat phobia? I noticed that lately, in the last two or three years, the norm in Kuwait has been that if you want to pretend to be a patriot and a caring person and show your love for Kuwait, all you have to do is raise your voice against expats. If you are a writer, then you start sharpening your pen and writing articles against expats. If you are an MP, go publically and shout that you will cut the number of expats in the country. The funniest part is that when you make these appeals during campaigns, all the people from the valet to the caterer and the cleaners and those who erect the tents are all expats. This is an ironic scene. If you want to write against corruption, you will start blaming expats. If anything malfunctions in the country – such as traffic jams – blame it on the expat. Of course traffic jams is the most popular topic to blame the expat. Some advise expats should not to be allowed to buy cars. Others suggest expats’ licenses should be confiscated or they should be prevented from getting them, etc, etc. If the health services in the hospitals are bad, then we blame expats. It has reached a point where we managed to convince our government to segregate polyclinics in Jahra – as a trial for now, but if the project succeeds, it will be applied to all other hospitals in other areas. Here are some more examples: If there is a sewage problem, blame the expat. If the quality of our education is bad, blame the expat. If the crime rate is rising, blame expats regardless of statistics on who the real perpetrators are. Crime exists in every country in the world. As they run out of issues to blame expats, they come up with new twists. The latest thing is from the government, that they are looking into the demographic imbalance and the fact that we are fewer than expats. You can discuss this issue for ages. It might be true – expats are majority in number but zero in power because we are, thank God, in control. The system in Kuwait and the Gulf made sure that expats have no political power. We have never suffered so far from any political issues from expats. All our political issues are local. Expats are merely coming from other countries to work for us and get their salaries. Some of them stay and others leave. Due to visa traffickers, we have a marginal group of illegal residents in Kuwait or expats arriving in the country who fall victim to greedy people who want to make money. They bring them and throw them on the streets without work. We forgot the movies and TV channels that influence our youth as well as the social media. We are a well-travelled nation and see things ourselves. My mother’s times are gone. We are the most well-travelled nation on earth. People get affected by other cultures and this is natural. Even the West is affected by people integrating and changes of cultures. This is a norm of life. We cannot just sit and blame every failing matter on expats. Instead of blaming, I would like to find solutions. One way is training our people to do everything from A to Z. Expats do not stop us from changing if we wish to. Train our boys and girls to start doing all jobs. Why not?
Posted on: Tue, 08 Apr 2014 04:11:34 +0000
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