Kuwait City World’s Worst City for Expats

So the Kuwait government can no longer employ every single Kuwaiti like it historically did, because the population has gone through several generations where people had 4+ kids very rapidly.

But at the same time, Kuwait had a huge quantity of jobs in the private sector because a country being rich gives opportunities to private business to expand, and they expanded so quickly they had to import labor to do it

So eventually you get to today, where the population structure of Kuwaitis in Kuwait means that there are no more jobs to give out, but about HALF of the population is going to start working in the next 5-10 years – the only possible employment for them is private sector.

So the government starts setting quotas on businesses – if you’re a bank, you must replace half your workforce with locals. If you’re a telecom similar. They raise the quotas periodically. This is a necessary step – both to force locals to adopt a new work mentality, and to force local companies to adopt a new employment mentality.

There is no way around this, Kuwait will collapse if it does not force this change through.

In Kuwait, private business owners also have a huge amount of political power. The heads of parliament for half the country’s history have always been from prominent merchant families, and they have a much bigger say in lawmaking than they do in other gulf countries. The Central Bank has authority over banks, so they can be a bit stricter – but go to a Kharafi owned, Alshaya owned, AlGhanim owned company that isn’t a bank or telcom and count the Kuwaitis on one hand.

You will hear excuses of “they don’t work”, just like landlords will not rent to Kuwaitis because “they have parties”.

It is because they understand their rights and fight back. A Kuwaiti will not give you his passport and ask for permission to leave the country, or work unpaid forced extra hours, or put up with 2 weeks of no vacation time. An expat will, and does, frequently, knowing that their status in the country is controlled by the employer and can be revoked for “performance reasons”.

So a lot of them just do nothing. The government will say “10% Kuwaitis in 3 years” and many private companies will straight up ignore it, pay fines instead, use wasta, hire their family members on paper to not come in.

So now you’re at the point where you will have

1) A youth employment crisis (the most dangerous type, because bored youth revolt)
2) Huge, huge multinational businesses with hundreds of jobs – honestly it’s impressive that such a small country has so many of these despite the laws
3) All of those jobs are still primarily staffed by expats

So… you’re the government. The merchants are ignoring you, you’re about to have an employment crisis, ad there are all these jobs the expats staff and continue to staff and they just won’t leave them.

So what do you do?

-Make visas harder to get, more expensive to get, and in some cases restrict them entirely so businesses MUST look locally

-Make life in general for expats less pleasant hoping to deter them and open up positions for Kuwaitis. Make it difficult to get a driver’s license, to get a 10 year visa.

-Make life in general for Kuwaitis easier. Incentivize them to work in private sector jobs, send them to scholarships abroad to make them competitive with expat recruits.

It is 100% intentional yes, and in terms of people Kuwait has more than enough young people to actually fill those jobs. It will take a mentality change but hey, Saudi has 100% Saudis working in their retail shops now – 10 years ago everyone said “It can’t be done”

It’s just not the same and there’s too many to read.