ABSTRACT
Kuwaiti citizenship entails substantial material and social advantages. This chapter considers developments in Kuwait prior to the Iraqi invasion, is not concerned with labor migration per se but with labor migration as a major component in the dynamics of social life under conditions of pluralism. It deals with the relations between two sharply differentiated social categories, the Kuwaitis and the non-Kuwaitis, each of which had its own preoccupations and projects in which the other was used as a means to their achievement. Kuwaiti society is strictly stratified in terms of ethnicity and class. When Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, the world reacted with surprise at the sight of tens of thousands of non-Kuwaiti Arabs, Indians, Eastern Asians, and Westerners trapped under the occupation or trying desperately to reach the borders of Jordan and Saudi Arabia. This surprise grew after liberation, when the predicament of approximately four hundred thousand Palestinian residents in Kuwait became a matter of international debate.
