Chapter 6 critically assesses the argument that Egypt’s emigration policy in the post-1970 period was driven by economic considerations. It demonstrates how economic considerations constitute a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to explain Egypt’s permissive labour emigration policy. It is structured around three sections: first, it identifies how the Egyptian regime initially approached labour emigration as a solution to three macroeconomic problems, namely the country’s increasingly prominent demographic issues; its chronic under- and unemployment problems; and, finally, its depleting foreign reserves and problematic balance of payments record. Second, it demonstrates how complete deregulation of emigration exacerbated, rather than improved, the economic indicators of each of the aforementioned variables. It explains in detail the negligible effect of population mobility on Egypt’s demographic issues, emigration’s contribution to the worsening of the country’s unemployment crisis, and the state’s inability to capture migrants’ economic remittances or to control the accompanying corruption and inflationary problems. The regime was acutely aware of these issues and the fact that they could have been avoided via regulation, yet it instead opted for complete deregulation. Finally, the chapter analyses the various problems such an approach engendered, and lays down the ways through which the regime’s approach to labour emigration set the conditions for the 2011 'Arab Spring' events.