Riyadh: Saudi Arabia's labour minister said in remarks published today that Riyadh supports a residency limit on the millions of foreign workers in the Gulf to prevent them from ever gaining a political voice in the oil-rich region.

"We do not want the day to come when we are forced allow the (foreign) workers to be represented in our parliaments or municipal councils," Ghazi al-Gosaib told the Arabic language Al-Eqtisadiah. He said he feared that international pressure would in the future force stats in the region to enfranchise expatriate workers.

Saudi Arabia is a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) along with Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Foreign workers make up about 13 million or 37 per cent of the three million population in these six conservative Muslim states.

They come mainly from the Asian sub-continent and are relied upon heavily to drive the booming economies of the oil-rich bloc. Gosaibi did not specify how long expatriate workers should be allowed to work in the GCC.

But Bahrain's Labour Minister Majeed al-Alawi said in an interview last year that he supported a six-year residency cap, fearing expatriate workers were eroding the national character of states in the Gulf.

Source : PTI