Political groups that are holding expatriates responsible for the state's deteriorating financial status have to cut down the fuss and stop acting arrogantly and racially. They should stop pretending as if expats are the ones depriving Kuwaitis from job opportunities, or that remittances they send to their families back home are behind the bad economic situation Kuwait is suffering from. Ever since the beginning of the decline of the prices of oil; the country's only financial resource, Kuwaiti and GCC 'Trump-like' citizens have shifted their attention to expatriates and their jobs, as if those expats removed citizens and took over their career positions and source of income.

Reason up people and tell us which jobs have expats taken over and deprived citizens from. Have Asian expats who sweep streets, collect your garbage or serve you at home by cooking your meals prevent you from making a living? Have expat construction workers and craftsmen in various lines take you away  from your historical professions? Are expat doctors and nurses medically treating you in various hospitals the ones you want deported? All this is just for the sake of an argument. Can you imagine how an expat doctor feels when prescribing a certain medicine to you while knowing that neither him nor his kids have access to it? Or how he would feel when paying high prices for medical services while knowing that citizens get them free of charge?

The same applies to all professions and jobs a citizen cannot do without or refuses to do, considering them as insulting to his outstanding 'GCC status and prestige'. Where do we start and end with such a state that depends on a sole source of income? A state that produced miserable groups who insist on blaming others for laxity and negligence of successive cabinets. Those cabinets have deliberately and intentionally nurtured the concept of citizens' dependence on the work of others and limited their professions in strictly administrative positions in a flabby, lazy and fatally bureaucratic public sector.

This has altered the nature of jobs in most state departments from providing public service to mere profiteering without really doing any true productive work in return. Those groups who are on spreading illusion and hypocrisy by distracting people and lying about expats must reconsider their diagnosis of GCC diseases; which are mainly caused by its political and, consequently, social systems. According to a Central Statistical Bureau report recently published by Al-Rai, only three percent of unemployed Kuwaitis would accept a private sector job and, while a majority of 58 percent prefer jobs in government establishments.

Our real dilemma in oil-rich countries are not expats who already suffer because of the ugliest form of shameful slavery known as the 'sponsorship' system, which is officially legalized by states and financially utilized by many through visa trafficking or through local 'Spartans' reliance on foreign slavery work. This  is nothing more than a policy of deception and avoiding facts by some of us, who are burying their heads in the sand while the state is facing its worst economic challenges. There is nothing stopping the state from denying expats access to Kuwait and deporting the ones already here to make more job opportunities for citizens. Just have those political outbidding hotshots tell us how long we might survive without rotting in place.-Translated by Kuwait Times from Al-Jarida

By Hassan Al-Essa