euro-Mediterranean Migration futures 43
Despite a certain slowdown, migration from Egypt and other MENA
countries to the Gulf and Libya has been more persistent and permanent
than the policies intended. It has proven notoriously diff icult to implement
the indigenisation policy while semi-legal migrants continue to enter through
intricate systems of visa-trading (IOM 2005) or through making the hadj,
the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. In fact, after the Gulf War, migration rates
quickly returned to pre-War levels (Zohry & Harrell-Bond 2003). The recent
surge in oil prices due to the war in Iraq and the lifting of the UN embargo on
Libya seem to have reversed the economic decline in the Arab oil countries,
which is likely to increase future demand for migrant labour. A qualitative
change did occur, however, in the strongly segmented labour markets of GCC
countries and Libya. Although an economic downturn in the 1980s and 1990s
led to calls to indigenise the workforce, native workers might have partially
taken over the high-level positions in the labour market, but they have con-
tinued to shun the heavy, lower-level jobs in the poorly paid private sector
(Baldwin-Edwards 2005; Hamood 2006). While Asian and, in the case of Libya,
sub-Saharan immigrants have increasingly f illed manual jobs in the unskilled
segments of the labour market, migrants from MENA countries to the Gulf
have increasingly tended to occupy the middle segments of the labour markets.
1.3.5 Diversif ication of migration and the Arab Spring
Although migration from Egypt to the Arab oil countries has continued,
Moroccan and Turkish migration to these countries slowed down over
the 1990s. Migration from Turkey and Morocco to the classic destination
of Europe continued predominantly because of family reunif ication and
family formation – mainly as the result of the transnational marriages of
Turks and Moroccans with the children of migrants.
Although Moroccan and Turkish ‘guest-worker’ migration to Europe
shares many features in character, scope and timing, there are a number of
important differences. First, Turkish migrants tend to be relatively better-
educated, which primarily ref lects the more developed state of the education
system in Turkey in comparison to Morocco (Reniers 1999). Second, while
the number of Moroccan asylum applicants is negligible, since the mid-1980s
and mid-1990s the migration of (predominantly Kurdish) asylum seekers
has been an important additional source of Turkish migration to Europe.
Between 1983 and 2003, approximately 1 million Turkish nationals sought
asylum from Western European countries (Avcı & Kirişci 2006). Third,
Turkish migration is overwhelmingly concentrated on Germany, whereas
Moroccan migration has shown a relatively higher degree of diversif ication