You also said "such an openly xenophobic way." I reject the idea that a) the framing is xenophobic in this case, and b) it needs to be framed more generally before we can fix this specific case.
>"We cannot afford to give our water away frankly to anyone, let alone the Saudis, for free," said Mayes.
This person is saying that giving the water away to the Saudis is worse than just giving it away. It isn't simply the action of taking the water that is troubling them. It is that it is going to a scary other. This is classic xenophobia.
It is not xenophobia to acknowledge it's worse to do something dumb which enriches your ideological and material enemies than to just do something dumb.