RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — A detainee died in a
stampede during a riot at a Saudi detention center for migrant workers awaiting
deportation, police said Monday, adding that nine others were injured.
[...]
The deportations are part of a Saudi
campaign to expel undocumented foreign workers after decades of lax immigration
enforcement allowed migrants to take many low-wage jobs that the kingdom’s own
citizens shunned. Saudi authorities, grappling with high unemployment, now want
those jobs for the kingdom’s citizens.
Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis seek work
in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, sometimes crossing into the kingdom illegally through
their country’s porous northern border. Yemen is the Arab world’s most
impoverished country and is reeling from several years of turmoil and political
upheaval.
[...]
Human Rights Watch has criticized the
conditions of detainees awaiting deportation in the kingdom. The rights group
last month said more than 12,000 Somali migrants were held under “appalling
conditions” before they were deported from Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi government says it has deported more than a quarter-million
migrants since the government began enforcing its crackdown in November.
Around 170,000 of those are Ethiopians, most of whom never acquired
visas, often taking perilous boat journeys across the Gulf of Aden to
Yemen from where they cross illegally into the kingdom with the help of
smugglers.
