A new displacement dynamic in the Horn of Africa is emerging from the implications of forced departures from Saudi Arabia.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Horn of Africa have sought and found semi-permanent work in the Gulf region, as have many migrants from South East Asia. Their socio-economic and political security is nonetheless being shaken by current shifts in the opportunities provided by the Gulf States to foreign workers, which is reflected in recent statistics of migrant departures from the region. Indirectly, it is also impacting millions of individuals in Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia whose lives are intertwined with these movements.
By mid-2019, around 2 million foreign nationals were reported to have left Saudi Arabia and the number of expatriate workers had fallen by around 22 percent in the preceding two and a half years. Their departures follow from several recent initiatives designed by the Saudi authorities to reduce the number of expatriate workers in the (arguably misplaced) hope that this will reduce unemployment among its own nationals. One such initiative introduced in July 2017 is a tax requiring foreign employees to pay 100 riyals per month (approximately $27) for each dependent registered on their iqama (work permit), including children. The fee, due when their documents come up for renewal each year, has subsequently increased each July by 100 riyals per dependent. If workers fail to pay this levy, amounting to hundreds of additional dollars per month even for a small family, they cannot renew their iqama and thus lose their legal right to reside and work in Saudi Arabia. At this point people risk becoming ‘stuck’, as the Saudi authorities prevent them from leaving until these debts, which continue to mount, are paid off. While the numbers of people caught in this limbo are hard to say, among the Eritrean population in Saudi, which numbers in the tens of thousands, our interlocutors stated regretfully that “there are too many to tell who this has happened to.” The change in the country’s taxation system has thus revealed the deep vulnerability of foreigners in a country where neither citizenship nor refugee status is available to them, and this aggressive new taxation system for workers and their dependents suggests that these initiatives are specifically designed to push out those with families.
For the Eritrean population that forms the focus of this post, composed of those who left the Gulf States and have subsequently found their way to Kampala, the situation has thrown up political as well as economic challenges. Travel to the Gulf states had for a long time constituted a safety valve, allowing them to leave circumstances of conflict and repression at home. Some Eritrean families in Riyadh and Jeddah had indeed been there for two to three decades, as parents had left violence, repression and economic collapse first under the Derg and now under the country’s current ruling party. Despite having never had access to asylum in Saudi Arabia on account of the country’s absence of a domestic refugee regime, they had nonetheless managed to secure a degree of social and economic security there over the ensuing decades, and many had raised and educated children in the country. Many of the young people we interviewed had never left the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. With the option of living and working in the Gulf now foreclosed to them, this population has been forced to encounter a new series of protection challenges in their ongoing search for a space of refuge.
We spoke with individuals who managed to exit Saudi with their families, travelling first to Eritrea and then quickly onwards from the country. As they re-entered Eritrea with the status of non-resident citizens, they were afforded the opportunity to legally leave the country again within a six-month window. This was critical: if they outstayed this duration, children would be sent to Sawa military training school and adults would be re-instated in the country’s national service programme, leaving them without the economic means to support their families. With access to labour markets in the Gulf, Israel and South Sudan largely foreclosed, however, the next move was unclear for families. Sudan and Ethiopia were seen as either too expensive or too insecure following improvements in the relationship between both their governments and the government in Asmara, and the horrific situation in Libya was lost on no-one. Families had thus congregated in Uganda where they were either pinning hopes on opportunities for moving abroad or resigning themselves to the next stage of their lives playing out in Kampala.
Most were planning on applying for asylum, despite holding out little hope that their claims would be successful. Endemic corruption within the institutions responsible for determining both refugee status and resettlement decisions meant that these options were largely unaffordable, and the authorities allegedly met their applications with scepticism if they admitted to having arrived from the Gulf. Individuals reported being told that their decision to migrate to the Gulf states however many years earlier made them labour migrants, not refugees. For the older generation amongst those we interviewed in Kampala, this dismissive attitude contributed to a sense that history was repeating itself. As one man questioned, “we went to Saudi [in the 1980s] because we could not wait as refugees in Sudan. We couldn’t wait for money – where was it going to come from?” The same question was now resurfacing in Uganda as families were taking stock of their limited options in Africa, as well as their continuing responsibility to support friends and family in Eritrea or on other journeys out of the country. The impacts of these shifts in the Gulf are thus likely to be magnified as these individuals’ transnational networks are called upon to compensate for the loss in income and remittances caused by their forced departures from the Gulf.
Though businesses in Saudi Arabia have voiced public concerns about these new policies negatively affecting the country’s economy, the Kingdom’s rulers have largely refused to compromise on this approach. The stories we gathered from Eritreans in Uganda are thus likely to continue being repeated across the Horn of Africa (as well as vast swathes of South East Asia) as migrant workers and their dependents are forced to leave through the intensification of nationalisation policies, which include the imposition of new taxation regimes such as these. Alongside its economic consequences, which will be felt much further afield than only those directly affected, this raises serious concerns for protection. Labour markets in the Gulf States had for decades provided an alternative, however imperfect, to applying for asylum in countries within the region. For many of those now being forced to depart these states, the countries or regions that they left remain unable to offer viable economic and political futures. They are left with little choice but to migrate in search of more secure alternatives, giving rise to a new dynamic of forced migration in the Horn.
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