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Kuwait will reduce the number of foreign expatriates living in the country within months through an updated residency law, according to the Interior Minister Anas al-Saleh speaking to the official Kuwait Television.Kuwait has made previous attempts to reduce the number of foreign nationals in the country, which is currently estimated to be around 70 percent, but public discussion has recentered on the issue in the wake of the lockdown enforced by the coronavirus pandemic.

Assembly Speaker Marzouq al-Ghanem said that the country would move to a focus on so-called “skilled” migrants rather than laborers, suggesting that the 1.3 million expats who “are either illiterate or can merely read and write” were not the priority

“Today, the real problem is not the resident,” Kuwaiti parliamentarian Omar al-Tabtabai told press at the time.“It is the person who brought the resident, and manipulated the resident, and let him live on the streets, and takes money from him, every month, every year,” he added.

Saudi Arabia still has the highest number of Egyptians living abroad, with 300,000 names, followed by Kuwait with 125,000, the United Arab Emirates with 65,000, Qatar and the US with 29,000 each, and Canada with 12,000.

Protests over unemployment spread from Oman's capital to provincial cities Salalah and Sur on Monday with a number of arrests reported.Facing growing unrest over high unemployment among young Omanis, the government moved on Sunday to pledge job creation plans and to restrict employment of expat labour in a country where the vast majority of private sector jobs go to foreign workers.

The protests followed a government statement on Sunday reaffirming plans to increase job creation for nationals by 25,000 over the next six months.A separate announcement by the minister of manpower, Abdullah bin Nasser al-Bakri, stated that the recruitment of expatriate labour to certain professions would be restricted for the next six months to encourage recruitment of local jobseekers

unemployment in 2016 stood at 18 percent

Oman was rocked by demonstrations as young people took to streets in cities across the country to protest a lack of jobs and economic opportunity. The unrest fell just weeks after the government, led by Oman’s new ruler, Sultan Haitham bin Tariq Al Said, introduced a 5 percent value-added tax (VAT) as part of a long-delayed fiscal reform package that included other cuts to state spending and plans to introduce an income tax.

Demonstrations over economic grievances in the Gulf’s most indebted state have occurred sporadically since the 2011 “Arab Spring”. The country’s previous ruler, the late Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said, managed to quell protesters by offering them generous state handouts. The new sultan responded to events in May in a similar fashion, promising nearly 15,000 public-sector jobs and another 15,000 jobs in the private sector to be funded by a $500 government stipend. But that strategy will likely delay reform designed to trim bloated state budgets and jump-start the country’s private sector to generate more jobs.

While Oman has less breathing room than its wealthier neighbours to successfully reform its economy, the delicate balancing act playing out there between reining in state spending and creating economic opportunities for young people lays bare a dilemma facing other Gulf nations.

In an effort to curtail public spending amid a coronavirus-induced economic slump, Oman announced it will not renew the contracts of the majority of its foreign consultants working in government. 

More than a third of the sultanate’s 4.6 million residents are expats

This month, Oman announced an additional 5% cut to the budgets of government bodies and the armed forces.