Despite strident calls by several lawmakers to cull the number of expatriates in the country, the number of foreigners in Kuwait keep rising.
According to the latest numbers released by Kuwait’s Central Statistical Bureau (CSB) Indians top the expatriate list with 889,000 people. The Indian population is nearly double that of the next largest expatriate community, the Egyptians, who accounted for 484,000 individuals. For their part, the Egyptians were again nearly double the number of Bangladeshis, who formed the third largest expatriate community in the country with 271,000 people.
The most recent statistics from CSB also reveals that over the last one year, the number of Filipino workers in the country dropped by over 11 percent from the 243,400 Filipinos at the start of 2018, to 216200 at the beginning of 2019. Experts believe that the sharp drop in Filipino numbers was the result of a mass exodus of Filipino maids in 2018, following the imbroglio that erupted last year between the two governments over the issue of mistreatment of maids by some sponsors in Kuwait.
On the other hand, the CSB statistics also highlighted that the total number of domestic workers at the end of the third-quarter of 2018 stood at 689,000, which marked an increase of about 9,000 compared to the same period in 2017. The workers, in nearly equal gender distribution, hailed mainly from four countries—India, Philippines, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
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