| MASSIVE IMMIGRATION BY ARAB WORKERS (particularly Egyptians, Yemenis, and Palestinians) TO THE PERSIAN GULF, where oil-rich states required an influx of labor to compensate for their own internal shortages. Most immigrants worked as unskilled or semiskilled laborers in fields such as construction. The proportion of immigrants in these societies reached extremely high levels: the United Arab Emirates, 85 percent; Qatar, 80 percent; Kuwait, 69 percent; Saudi Arabia, 43 percent; Libya, 42 percent; and Oman, 34 percent. The best available estimates have put the total number of Arab immigrants in the Gulf region at about 5 million. The guest workers have made vital contributions to their home economies outside the Gulf through remittances from their wages (in the case of Egypt, for example, as much as 10 percent of the annual GNP originated from this source alone by the late 1980s). | 1 |
