Economist – Go home, but who will replace you?

MILLIONS of pious pilgrims flock to Mecca every year, but the Muslim holy city’s newest, biggest hotel serves a different clientele. Just months after opening, the Shumeisi Deportation Centre already holds more than 20,000 Egyptians, Ethiopians, Indonesians, Yemenis and citizens of other nationalities, nearly half of them women. They will not be there for long. Nearly all will soon be packed off home, joining an exodus that has seen perhaps one in ten of Saudi Arabia’s estimated 9m foreign workers leave the kingdom in little more than a year. Read More