Introduction to the Special Issue of AJMEIS on “Living Together Separately: Social and Cultural Implications of Migration to the GCC”

Abstract

Over the years since discourse about migrant labour became central to academic study of the Gulf region, a substantial outpouring of literature has been produced on the phenomenon. Its statistical characteristics, its significance for the development of the economies and political systems of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, and its impact on labour-exporting societies and economies have all been meticulously documented. Attention has also been given to the living conditions of the migrant workers themselves. There has, however, been surprisingly little analysis of the phenomenon in terms of the communities which have been spawned by migration to the region. The social, political and cultural lives of these communities have seldom been given recognition, let alone seriously documented and researched. Furthermore, neither the impact of these communities on host community society and culture, nor on those aspects of life in the countries from which the migrants originate, have been given significant attention. One exception to this is the work of Yuting Wang, herself a contributor to this Issue, on the Chinese community in the UAE. The relative lack of attention given to this aspect of migration to the Gulf suggests a failure to recognise that such communities exist, as distinct from statistically-generated groupings of fellow-nationals. In other words, they are seen as temporary and evanescent, not an ongoing and established part of the Gulf’s social and cultural infrastructure. But they are not a temporary phenomenon. Individual migrants may return to their ‘home’ countries at the end of their service in the Gulf, but the communities remain. Some of those deemed migrants were, in any case, born in their current state of residence, and have no home elsewhere to go to, such that the moniker ‘migrant’ ill-suits them. The communities are now, and will remain, an integral part of the societies of the Gulf region. They are not short-term intrusions into the region, nor are they simply extensions of the societies from which they came. They have over time developed their own cultural and social characteristics, shaped by the exigencies and requirements of the Gulf environment in which they have developed. In none of the states of the Gulf do they enjoy the privileges accorded to the native citizens, but the position of the migrant communities is not entirely marginal either: they are necessary to the effective running of the economies and societies of