ISLAMABAD: Recruitment of Pakistani laborers by Saudi Arabian employers has drastically dropped by 11% which accounts to almost 460,000 in 2016 despite the fact that the Arab kingdom has remained the busiest corridor for Pakistani migrants higher than in any year since 2005.
Nonetheless, in 2017, Bangladesh apparently replaces Pakistan as the main source of labor force to Saudi Arabia, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) says in a new report, ‘Labour Migration in Asia’.
This downward trend is likely to continue since partial figures up to October 2017 indicate only 450,000 departures for overseas employment from Pakistan. The increase in Bangladeshi workers going to Saudi Arabia can be attributed to the end of a six-year ban on recruitment, which was lifted in mid-2016.
The flow of Pakistani workers to the Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries has sharply declined during 2015-2016, by nearly 50%. In 2016, the influx of workers to Asean countries were only 10,743 which included 10,625 to Malaysia as against 20,369 Pakistani workers in 2015. While only 33 Pakistani workers went abroad to Singapore and 85 to Brunei Darussalam.
The ADB report points out that due to certain amendments of policies in Saudi Arabia and Malaysia, the downward trend has been reinforced. In total, about 5 million workers were deployed from the 12 main Asian countries of origin in 2016. This corresponds to an 8% decrease compared to the previous year.
Looking at the main non-OECD destination countries in Asia, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries received 528,000 fewer Asian workers in 2016 than in 2015. Saudi Arabia, despite a 9% drop in 2016, remains the top destination, with an influx of over 1 million Asian foreign workers.
Nonetheless, the drop observed in 2016 can be related to the country’s economic health, as well as to the ongoing “Saudization” policy which was first introduced in 2011, with the aim to reduce foreign worker reliance.
International migrants, that is, people residing in a country other than their own, have increased significantly over the last two decades. Amid the 247 million migrants in the world estimated in 2015, around 30% or 75 million lived in Asia. This represents a 39% increase from 48 million migrants based in Asia in 1990.
The vast majority of international migrants in the region are spotted in South Asia and Western Asia, accounting for 19% and 51% of the region’s total migrant stock, respectively.
The most exponential change in 2015 among the OECD destination countries for Asian migrants is Germany, which too a leap from seventh to fourth place in one year, to receive more Asian migration than traditional destination countries such as Canada, Australia, or the United Kingdom.
Germany received 209,000 new Asian migrants in 2015, almost 100,000 more than a year before. This is mostly due to the considerable rise in migration from Afghanistan, and to a somewhat lesser extent from Pakistan. Indeed, 85,000 Afghans and 24,000 Pakistanis arrived in Germany in 2015, most of them seeking asylum.
However, even without these two nationalities, migration from Asia to Germany would still have increased by about 15%, driven by migration from India, which has been on the rise every year since 2005.
Saudi Arabia has increased its share in remittances to Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan. Remittances from Gulf countries to the Philippines more than doubled in the same period, with remittances from the United Arab Emirates in particular more than tripling in the last 5 years. Despite their increasing importance for Asian workers and their home countries, remittances to Asia still sum up to a relatively small share of those sent from GCC countries.
The report says the ‘Pakistan Remittance Initiative’ (PRI), a joint initiative of the State Bank of Pakistan, Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis, and Ministry of Finance is seen as a success story. The volume of remittances coming through formal channels have increased substantially.
By UN estimates, there were 244 million international migrants living outside their countries of birth or citizenship in 2015. A significant portion of this global migrant population, 43% or 104 million, were born in Asia and a large portion is found in other Asian countries.
During 2000–2015, the number of migrants originating in Asia grew at a faster annual rate than those from any other world region, by an average of 2.8pc per year.
The biggest sources of emigrants are from China, India, and the Philippines, respectively, with Vietnam and Pakistan forming the second tier.
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