Despite the new wealth, a major fraction of society, both Saudi and immigrant, have trouble balancing their budgets at the end of the month. Saudi cab drivers, especially "clandestine" ones, allow one to grasp a chunk of this reality. They allow one to see the country from below, to glimpse the lives of people who can't dream of traveling abroad or speculating on the stock market, who don't own any of the fabulous detached houses that line the cities' avenues, hidden from view by high walls. Those who accost potential customers at the airport generally have other jobs: as civil servants, white-collar workers, even soldiers.

Ahmed is a first-year economics student. Originally from Jizaan, in the south, he came to Riyadh to live with an uncle and some cousins. To make ends meet, he drives a taxi whenever he doesn't have classes. "Life has gotten harder the past few years," he complains. Although he misses his native region, which he revisits regularly, he is clearheaded. "Here, lots of things are free, especially schooling and health insurance," he tells me. He has great confidence in King Abdullah, whose popularity is at its height (his renunciation of the title "His Majesty," as well as hand-kissing, were greatly appreciated). The new king increased the salaries of employees and civil servants by 15 percent when he came to the throne, an indispensable measure, because salaries had been trailing far behind inflation. But even now a civil servant cannot, in general, live on his salary alone.

In Riyadh the official taxis are many; it's probably the only capital in the world where one can haggle over the fare on the meter. The drivers are mostly Pakistani or Indian, and have lived far from home for many years, without being able to bring their families over. They complain more about the contempt to which they are often subjected and the total dependence in which they are kept by their employers--who decide whether they can obtain temporary residency status--than about their wages. Their problems, however, are starting to be discussed openly. The National Association for Individual Rights, founded two years ago by the authorities, proposes that immigrants who have been in the region for more than ten years be naturalized. One of its leaders, Hammad Suhail Abidin, explains that some of them "have always lived here, don't speak any other language, don't know any other country. It is unfair that they risk being expelled." Discussion of this issue has permitted the adoption of new legislation protecting domestic servants, all of them foreign, but it has also evoked racism, especially in Jeddah, where many illegal immigrants arrive under cover of pilgrimage to Mecca. And repression has intensified: In Jeddah, during October alone 14,000 illegal immigrants were arrested.

Moreover, a new sword of Damocles is held above immigrants' heads: the "Saudi-ization" of manual labor, which aims to replace foreign laborers with Saudi citizens. This plan is now being systematically implemented: Businesses must hire an increasing number of Saudi employees. These plans are being fought by businessmen and -women, who complain that young Saudis are not well trained and above all are not ready to subject themselves to even minimal work discipline. Some business owners report that they have Saudis on their payrolls simply to meet the quotas. One businessman from Jeddah, aware of his responsibilities toward the country's future, found an original solution: "Since we don't pay taxes, we created a fund for young Saudis. So we pay about a hundred of them simply for coming in and getting trained."

The 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century, when oil prices had collapsed, were lean times for Saudi Arabia. The education and health infrastructures, which were constructed in haste in the 1970s, entered a period of crisis. There are not enough universities for the tens of thousands of kids pouring out of the high schools each year, and youth unemployment has grown as a result of an unprecedented demographic explosion: By 2006 the population exceeded 27 million, with more than half under 19 and more than a quarter foreign laborers (who represent two-thirds of the manual labor force). The 2006 budget, which has just been adopted, aims to tackle these problems. Exceptional efforts are planned in the realm of public investment, especially in education, which absorbs more than a quarter of the total budget (construction of three universities and 2,673 schools, renovation of 2,000 others), and health (creation of twenty-four new hospitals, which will be added to the eighty-nine in the process of completion). The first challenge will be to provide a job for everyone. At the beginning of January the Labor Department claimed that unemployment among men was only 5 percent, far from the current independent estimates of about 20 percent. The expectations, desires and frustrations of tens of thousands of young men who enter the labor market every year, and of the hundreds of thousands of young women hoping for employment, will in part determine the future of the country.

It's enough to watch these thousands of idle young people hanging out in Riyadh on Wednesday night, before the Thursday-Friday weekend, with no meeting places that can be shared by both sexes, to get a sense of their boredom. Although international culture is flooding the country through the Internet and satellite television, there's still not a single movie theater in the kingdom. Here too the debate is fierce, with one editorialist recently wondering: "Is no one watching the satellite channels, financed by Saudi funds, that broadcast films twenty-four hours a day, Arab and foreign, old and new?... Will projecting them in movie theaters make us into a 'modern' society?"

There is nothing surprising in the fact that, with boredom never far away, juvenile delinquency and drug addiction are getting worse. On weekends many young Saudis go to Bahrain, an island kingdom connected to Saudi Arabia by a giant bridge, for the entertainment they are deprived of in their own country. Eleven million travelers crossed the bridge in 2004. "In neighboring countries a family has enough options to attend movies and theaters, or book fairs, while we invent new ways to smuggle in entertainment magazines," wrote a journalist in the Saudi Gazette.

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