Highly Skilled Migrants in Qatar

• In Event: Elite Mobility and Highly Skilled Migration

Abstract

Scholars have increasingly drawn attention to the life experiences of lower skill labor migrants, who for decades have dominated the workforces of the six smaller oil states of the Persian Gulf. But little scholarly attention has been paid to the region’s smaller cohort of highly skilled migrants, who are numerically certainly not as significant as the larger lower skilled migrants, but still have contributed and continue to contribute significantly to the development of the Gulf states and their economies. This paper examines how highly skilled migrants experience the Gulf, both professionally and personally, by providing empirical data on the life strategies of highly skilled migrants employed in different sectors in the rapidly globalizing city of Doha. The broader aim is to shed light on highly skilled migrants’ motivations, career and personal experiences, their reasons for coming to and their reasons for staying in Qatar. In addition, the aim of this paper is to identify the types of human capital that highly skilled migrants deploy in different sectors, and to describe the means by which human capital is used, communicated and developed through transactions with ‘local’ citizens or other permanent residents of Qatar. This is accomplished by analyzing the results of a nationally representative survey of 300 high-skilled expatriates in Qatar, as well key-informant, in-depth interviews with 30 of these individuals. The survey and qualitative interviews address a number of areas, including among other things: highly skilled migrants’ careers and professional lives in Qatar, motivations and drivers for coming to the country and reasons for staying, human capital development— both the tacit skills and know-how that they contribute to their work, organizations and the country— and their values and aspirations relating to their mobility, as well as life strategies and future aims and life strategies. For this project the Qatari workplace serves as a concrete site where overarching labor laws and conditions that impact highly skilled migrants are examined. Conceptually, this pilot project addresses broader questions of labor law, state policies of labor migration governance, current processes recruitment, and employment practices in Qatar.

Author

• Zahra R Babar, Georgetown University