ABSTRACT
The Middle East is a region of intense mobility, both voluntary and forced. It hosts some of the largest and most enduring refugee populations in the world, namely Afghans in Iran and Pakistan, Palestinians in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and in more or less every Arab state, and, more recently, Syrians in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. It is also home to the largest recipients of labour migrants in the world, the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries (GCC). Since the beginning of the oil era, GCC countries have been powerful magnets for both regional and international migration. Arab, Asian and European migrants have converged to the Gulf, bringing their skills but also their social, gender, cultural, religious and political identities to sparsely populated countries like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and to larger societies like Oman and Saudi Arabia. In those less-populated GCC countries, migrants have ended up representing up to 90 per cent of the local population and 98 per cent of the labour force; in Qatar, for instance, migrants make up 99.8 per cent of the private-sector labour force.
