International labour office geneva

Figure 2 : Egyptian migrants remittance flows (1977-2007) 

Source: World Bank (2008a), World Development Indicators CD ROM. 

The US ranked top among the countries from which Egyptians send their remittances 

followed by Kuwait, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia (Table 2).  

Table 2: Distribution of Egyptian remittances by main source (2007/2008) 

Country 

Value in billion USD 

Percentage % 

 USA 

2.8 

32.3 

 Kuwait 

1.8 

21.0 

 UAE 

1.4 

16.3 

 Saudi 

Arabia 

0.9 

11.2 

 Others 

1.6 

19.2 

Source: Central Bank of Egypt (2008), Annual Report 2007/2008. 

Historically, migration began to play a role of paramount importance in the Egyptian 

context in the 1970s, whereas in the 1960s it was not economically viable, and was 

politically unfeasible. From the 1950s until the mid 1960s, under President Nasser, there 

were very strict controls by the GOE on emigration. The 1970s was the golden era for 

emigration due to the demand for labour (skilled and unskilled) in Arab countries (mainly 

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GCC countries) which, at that time, were adopting liberal policies towards migrants. The 

golden era continued till the mid 1980s. After the second half of the 1980s, the Egyptian 

migrant labour force faced a number of problems related to domestic and international 

factors, such as: the end of the first Gulf War; the fall in price of oil; the decline in the 

demand for construction workers in Arab countries; the policy of replacing foreign labour 

with a national labour force undertaken by the GCC countries; and the replacement of 

Egyptian labour with Asian labour in a large number of Gulf countries (IOM, 2003). 

In the late 1980s a counter-flow of return migrants from the Gulf area to Egyp,t and a 

sharp decline in the number of new work contracts for Egyptian migrants, took place. As a 

result, the flow of emigration to Arab countries slowed down sharply till the beginning of 

the 1990s with some exceptions, as the flow of emigrants to Saudi Arabia and Libya 

experienced a noticeable increase in the 1990s (IOM, 2003). The years 1992–1997 

witnessed an upward trend in the wake of the Second Gulf War and the return of migrant 

workers to Kuwait. However, a large number of temporary migrants decided to remain in 

Egypt as well. The year 1998 witnessed another downward trend, partly due to the 

slowdown in the world economy as a consequence of the collapse of the East Asian 

financial markets in 1997 (Roman, 2006). However, the flow of migrants picked up 

afterwards though the golden migration era of the 1970s has not been replicated (Nassar, 

2007).  

The prospects for increasing the level of migration do not look promising from the 

demand side, as several Arab countries, as well as many EU countries, have adopted more 

restrictions on international migration. Security and cultural problems, besides the 

conventional political and economic problems of immigration, have created a lot of 

concern and lowered the expectations on high migrant flows from Egypt among other 

migrant origin countries (de Silva and Silva-Jáuregui, 2004). As asserted by Girgis (2002), 

the replacements of Arab workers by Asians, and the open unemployment among Gulf 

nationals, are the major reasons behind the lessening of migration flows from Egypt and 

other Arab countries to the Gulf. Moreover, the cyclical changes in world oil prices have a 

significant impact on the demand for Egyptian migrants, especially in the Gulf countries. 

Such prospects of changing migration trends should be taken into consideration by the 

GOE and its partners when designing its migration policies.

 

During the early 1970s, many Egyptian workers were employed in construction. 

Since then, the percentage of scientists and technicians has increased and the share of 

production workers has declined, although the percentage remains high comprising one-

third of migrants. Table 3 shows that more than 40 per cent of Egyptian migrants in the 

region are skilled workers and that unskilled labourers have been replaced by Asian 

workers more than the skilled ones.