Our Prodig(al) Children

Everyone has someone in the family who left to study abroad. A son, a daughter, a nephew, a niece. Tuition fees were paid, teeth were gritted, pride was felt. Degrees were earned. They went to work in the Gulf. We called it success. Today, that story is drawing to a close. Gulf countries have decided to prioritize employment for their own citizens. It is their right, and it is a deep-rooted trend, not a temporary measure. The major economic vision programs — Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 among them — are designed precisely to reduce dependence on foreign labor. Lebanese workers there have begun receiving termination letters, and many of those still in post find their contracts quietly unrenewed.

Worse still, there is the war — or rather, chronic instability. The confrontation between Iran and the United States, the tensions in the Red Sea, the fragility of political equilibria throughout the region: all of this has sown uncertainty. Foreign companies are repatriating their employees as a precaution. Investors are leaving. The economy is slowing. The Gulf, once so open a market, is closing. Perhaps not forever, but for now, yes. And no one can predict when, or in what form, it will reopen.

Europe is not a credible large-scale alternative. Unemployment there is high across many countries, and the barriers to entry for a non-European have become near-insurmountable. Landing a job there without European status is not individually impossible, but it is slow, costly, and uncertain. Above all, Europe has neither the capacity nor the will to absorb massive inflows from a single country. For thousands of young Lebanese at once, it is simply not a solution.

So what do they do? We have an entire generation — intelligent, graduates of the finest universities, fluent in three or four languages, seasoned in multinationals or consulting firms — and that generation has nowhere left to go. Except one place. Lebanon. Lebanon with its power cuts that paralyze the working day, its banking collapse that vaporized a lifetime of savings, its political class we all know by heart, with its schemes and its stagnation. To suggest this might be good news sounds counterintuitive. But let us take a moment to think. For fifty years, every time the situation in Lebanon grew difficult — war, economic crisis, political assassinations — the best people left. And because they left, the pressure on the system eased. Emigration served as a corrective mechanism. Nothing truly changed, because the driving forces that might have demanded change were elsewhere. The Gulf, Europe, North America functioned as an immense safety valve. They absorbed our problems in our stead. Now, that valve is closing. Not abruptly, but through a slow and inexorable contraction.

For the first time in decades, our young graduates have no real option but to turn their gaze toward Lebanon. Not out of sudden patriotism — though that can help — but because the other doors are closing one by one. And history shows that when there is no alternative left, people end up building where they stand. Not out of love of country, but out of sheer survival instinct and the drive for personal fulfillment. Because it is the only option on the table.

Living in Lebanon today costs far less than Dubai, Doha, or Paris. A young person working for a foreign company, paid in dollars from Beirut, lives very well — comfortably, even. This model already exists, sustained by a handful of digital and services pioneers. It now needs to be developed and given structure. Remote work has changed everything. The pandemic accelerated a deeper shift: today, one can work for a company in London, New York, or Dubai from one's living room in Beirut. A stable internet connection, a manageable time difference, and the rest takes care of itself. The client is elsewhere, the money arrives in hard currency, life is lived in Lebanon — with everything that entails, both beautiful and bleak.

Those returning from the Gulf do not come back empty-handed. They have savings — no fortunes, perhaps, but a cushion. They carry professional contacts spanning the globe. They have experienced what a functioning administration actually looks like, what efficient customer service means, what long-term planning requires. They can build companies here. Small ones at first. Sized for the local market or oriented toward the export of services. But real ones. And a generation returning with all of this, with nothing to expect or lose from the current political system, is a generation capable of voting differently, with sharper demands. They can get involved in municipalities, where daily life is genuinely decided. They can shift things politically, simply by refusing the customary arrangements and holding to one clear criterion: choosing people for their competence, not their connections. None of this is automatic. Nothing is, in this country.

Returning alone, without a safety net, without a collective project, risks being swallowed by the system or leaving again quickly, more embittered than before. But returning as a group, organized, financially independent, with complementary skills — that is something else entirely. The difference between the two is a decision. A conscious decision to build something here. Not a promise handed down from above.

We always ask the same question, in Lebanese families, around the tables of the diaspora: where will our children go? The question has become agonizing, because the traditional answers are disappearing. Perhaps it is time to ask the real question — the one that unsettles and liberates at once: what can they build here, those who have seen everything elsewhere, if they are given — and if they give themselves — a reason to stay?

Who could have imagined that one day we would be calling family in Dubai, Doha, Kuwait, or Jeddah to ask how their night was? That image says everything. It tells the story of a complete reversal of perspective. For decades, it was we, in Lebanon, who received anxious calls from our parents, our brothers and sisters who had gone to work abroad. We were the source of worry. The fragile hearth that people called to verify was still standing. Today, it is they who must be called. Those we thought settled in the antiseptic comfort of glass towers and air-conditioned shopping malls. Asking them how their night was. Whether they slept. Whether anxiety left them in peace. Because the region is trembling. Because the equilibria we believed stable are cracking. Because no one is sheltered — not even inside the air-conditioned bubbles of the desert.

And suddenly, we grasp the cruel irony of history. For fifty years, we sent our children to the Gulf to protect them from Lebanon. To shelter them from our wars, our crises, our chaos. We believed we were sending them into the future, into stability, into predictability. And now it is perhaps Lebanon that is becoming the relative refuge. Not because it is safer — God knows it is not — but because when the whole region burns, one goes home. One returns to where one understands the codes and the language, where one can read the air before it turns.

Who could have said that one day it would be us extending a hand? Who could have said that the exile would become the one we comfort? That the roles would reverse so completely?

The night is long across the whole region right now. But at least in Lebanon, we are accustomed to darkness. We know how to manage it. We know how to light candles, invent light, remain standing in the dark. So yes, we have the right to dream. We have the right to look at this returning generation and say: what if it is them? We have the right to imagine that this country, with its monstrous flaws, might hold a card it has never held before.

Lebanon was never a regional hub because it had no need to be. The money came from the Gulf, from expatriates, from rentier income. Why fight to build something solid when one could survive in the disorder? Today, that rentier income is drying up. The money will no longer come to smooth over our imbalances. And that, perhaps, is the extraordinary chance this moment holds.

Let us look at the assets of the situation, for once. A time zone that allows working with Europe in the morning and the United States in the afternoon. A cosmopolitan, multilingual culture that exists nowhere else in the region. A cost of living that has become competitive again. A pool of talent trained at the finest institutions, returning with a hunger to build that they never had before. And above all, above all: a youth that is no longer afraid. When one has lived through the collapse, the loss of savings, the disappearance of loved ones in an explosion, there is not much left to lose. And those with nothing left to lose are the most dangerous to the established order — and the most powerful in creating a new one.

So yes, let us dream. Let us dream that Beirut becomes again what it once was: the crossroads of the region. Not the crossroads for dubious capital and suitcases full of cash, but for minds, for start-ups, for companies seeking talent they cannot find elsewhere. Let us dream that multinationals look at this trilingual, resilient, creative generation and conclude: this is where we need to be. Not for natural resources, but for human ones.

The world is changing. Work no longer has a fixed address. Companies are seeking ecosystems where talent is abundant and the cost of living is attractive. Why not us? Why not now?

This is not a prediction. It is a heading. Not a certainty, but an intention. The infernal cycle we have spoken of — the emigration of the best, the system's survival through absence — can stop. It stops when we decide it stops. When those who return say: we are staying. When those who never left say: we are building.

We have the right to dream that tomorrow will be different. We even have the duty. Because in a country that no longer offers anything, the dream becomes the last resource that remains.

And the Lebanese have been transforming nothing into something for centuries. That, perhaps, is our genius. Transforming absence into presence. Transforming departure into return. Transforming the end of one world into the beginning of another.

So yes, we have the right. And for once, we even have the arguments.