But Mustafa, like so many in his age group, has no job and no discernible ambition. Estimates of unemployment among Saudis top 15 percent, and approach 30 percent among those between ages 20 and 24. Each year about 340,000 Saudi men enter the workforce, vying for just 175,000 jobs. The unsuccessful drift into an ever growing army of the bored, spending their days and nights in the prolonged adolescence of the shopping mall circuit, numbering and street cruising.
The solution would seem obvious: Replace foreign workers with Saudis. Under a policy known as Saudization, the government has been trying to do exactly that since the mid-1980s. The state grants large interest-free loans to any citizen who wants to establish a private business, and offers salaries to students willing to undertake vocational training. The goal is to replace 60 percent of the foreign workers with Saudi nationals, in jobs ranging from taxi driver to administrative manager. But two decades into the policy, foreigners still make up more than 90 percent of all employees in the kingdom's private sector.
Until recently, every young Saudi thought he could go straight from school to an executive suite. "They imagined that it would be a society of all chiefs and no Indians," Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a leading real estate developer and entrepreneur, told the Arab News last year.