MUSCAT: Coffee shop manager Lalit Jadeja groaned as white-robed Omani officials swooped down on his Filipina cashier at one of the largest shopping malls in this Persian Gulf kingdom. It was the Omanization squad.

Why, the officials demanded, was a foreigner working the cash register?

The officials were enforcers of Oman’s campaign to put its young citizens in jobs occupied mostly by cheaper foreign workers. Similar programs, costing millions of dollars, are being tested across the oil-rich gulf region, where many are concerned that frustrated young people are susceptible to radical ideology.

But economists and other analysts say the programs have made little difference. In some cases, as in hiring quotas for citizens, government efforts have angered employers who say the campaigns have fostered a sense of job entitlement among local young people.

“It has to be fixed,” Jadeja, one of millions of Indians who have come to the gulf for jobs offered by its thriving oil economies, said later. “It will be an atom bomb one day.” (full story)