Relationships with Foreigners in Saudi Arabia

Video Transcript

“A Saudi will treat us, as Americans, or the Brits or maybe Canadians with a lot of respect, and very [cordially]. They do not treat Pakistanis, Filipinos, Indians with that same level of respect. They’re basically indentured servants, and that's hard to take. Because on all these installations that we do these exercises, the people running the installation, doing all the engineering and the other infrastructure stuff, whether it be communications or whatever, are not Saudis. They’re TCNs, third-country nationals.  And in order to get lot of this work done, we will work with them. And of course I always treat these people well, because that's just the way I am, the way we operate. But I’ve seen Saudis just treat them like crap, that's kind of hard to take.  Not physically abuse them, but treat them very disrespectfully.”

In this video, a Saudi Arabia expert discusses Saudi attitudes toward foreigners.