Oman Intensifies Localization Strategies

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Oman Intensifies Localization Strategies

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following briefing was published by Migrant Rights on 13 February 2014]

Nationalization policies in Oman and the wider Gulf region are not new; many programs began in the late 1980s and enforcement has since fluctuated – often waning in periods of heavy development and revived in economic downturns. The spade of crackdowns and mass deportations in 2013 encompassed a renewed implementation of localization schemes throughout the Gulf, largely to pre-empt rising national unemployment and the social unrest that would necessarily follow. Though the Saudi crackdowns featured most prominently in international media, similar policies were also implemented in Kuwait and Oman.  Most recently, Oman announced that companies failing to employ nationals will be effectively prohibited from operating starting March 1. Similar to Saudi Arabia’s Nitiqat, Omani companies are ascribed different grades based on the proportion of nationals in their work force. Omanization and wider Gulf localization policies aim to increase the employment of nationals and reduce dependency on expatriate labor, a policy objective at the sovereign discretion of any state. However, the means and the narrative employed in these schemes too often transgress upon the rights and dignity of migrant workers.

Omani officials held that the new laws target illegal visa trading, in which citizens sell the visas allocated to them under the sponsorship system. Visas are sold to migrants directly as well as to employers seeking to recruit expatriate workers cheaply or to circumvent quotas on expatriate employment.  Migrants typically pay their stand-in sponsors for the initial visa and a yearly fee in order to renew their visas while working for another employer. In some cases, migrants also pay a percentage of their monthly salaries to these sponsors.  Migrants who work for an entity other than their registered sponsor are considered illegal and if discovered face fines, imprisonment, and deportation. Though Omani officials recognize that this black market often serves to exploit migrants, they have not acknowledged that the root cause of visa racketeering is the sponsorship system itself; the linkage which renders visa-trading a profitable enterprise is the very coupling of legal residency with the sponsorship of Omani citizens, yet no reforms to address this vulnerability have been proposed.

Instead, Oman’s new labor migration policies may render visa trading and other forms of undocumented migration even more likely. In the past, many of the Gulf’s aggressive nationalization schemes only marginally or temporarily reduced the proportion of either documented or undocumented migrant workers for several reasons including: the low availability of locals willing or able to perform expatriate jobs; the deleterious economic effects of rapid workforce depletion; and the impracticality of permanently enforcing inspections or ‘closed borders.’  Though Oman is poorer than its Gulf compatriots and possesses the lowest proportion of expatriates (estimated at 44% in 2013), its localization policies are likely to suffer from the same issues of inefficiency and noncompliance.  Local businessmen have indicated their opposition to the new law, stating that small and medium-sized businesses especially will be devastated by the abrupt introduction of these requirements.

In the past, mass raids against undocumented workers have had deleterious effects even on sectors of the economy maintained by nationals; for example, Oman’s 2010 mass deportations severely undermined Muscat’s taxi services, which predominantly served migrant workers who could not afford vehicles. Omani drivers reported massive reductions in earnings and many faced difficulty obtaining other work to compensate their losses. Deportations of illegal workers consequently had a negative impact on national employment, as the taxi enterprise represented one of few occupations accessible to older nationals who lacked an education or trade.

The scheme appears particularly overzealous in light of Oman’s preceding localization strategies, which has had the affect of introducing only 139 migrants into the workforce last December. These moves include a six-month ban on expatriate recruitment in cleaning and construction sectors for smaller companies, which officials claim facilitate visa fraud. In 2013, increased raids and inspections led to the apprehension of over 13,000 undocumented workers and the cancellation of over 16,000 visas.

Furthermore problematic is the narrative on migration that necessarily accompanies these policies in order to justify their implementation to aggrieved businessmen and to redirect accountability for economic troubles; in particular, Gulf states locate migrants as the cause of unemployment in order to scapegoat mismanagement of bloated public budgets.  Despite migrants’ low wages and their contribution to essential infrastructure and revenue-generating tourist destinations, states criticize the volume of their remittances as exploitative of national resources.  These accusations are supplemented by exaggerated claims, such that expatriates in managerial positions take a 95% cut of local businesses. Sponsors are likely to charge a much more significant cut of any business for which they are legally responsible, particularly as migrants are entirely dependent upon them for their legal residence and income.  Furthermore, officials often fail to acknowledge the revenue produced by these businesses nor the need for their services.  In Saudi Arabia, such oversight during the initial stages of Nitaqat enforcement caused a severe stoppage of vital services and inflation in the cost of consumer goods. Shops closed, schools went without janitors, and even burial services were affected by raids that depleted the work force and deterred even documented migrants from appearing in public. Though some of these effects have tapered alongside a reduction in the intensity of these inspections, the negative impact remains evident in sectors such as construction, where 33% of planned projects have been canceled. The economic consequences of nationalization programs that are largely inconsiderate to states’ economic systems and migration regimes are the very reasons their enforcement eventually subsides.

Furthermore, the zeal with which localization projects are implemented highlight the government’s misplaced prioritization of migrant issues; while resources to monitor critical employment issues – such as safety and housing conditions or timely salaries – are scarce, inspections for nationalization compliance are attentively conducted at least in the first few months of implementation. Penalties for visa and quota noncompliance are also more thoroughly enforced than those for labor violations.

Though states possess a sovereign right to restrict migration, policies must be implemented with sensitivity for migrant workers’ rights. Globally, states often approach migration from within security and economic frameworks, displacing rights-based approaches. This paradigm is compounded by Gulf governments’ conception of migrants as a temporary, flexible, and therefore disposable workforce; on international platforms, Gulf states are careful to classify expatriate workers as contractual laborers rather than migrant workers in order to deflect accountability of U.N. labor and migration treaties. Domestically, states perpetuate and harness these perceptions to use migrants as a policy tool, obscuring their human and labor rights in the process.

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412