Saudi Arabia’s monarch King Abdulla has extended by four months the grace period for illegal expatriates to get their work and residence status regularised. Indians would be among the major beneficiaries of the royal decree.

The new deadline, November 4, coincides with the last day of the Hijra Year 1434. The extension of the grace period comes just a day before the July 3 three-month amnesty decreed by the King at the end of April.

The extension has come as huge relief to hundreds of thousands of illegal expatriate workers, including several thousand Indians.

The King in his decree referred to the recommendations made by the Interior, Labour and Foreign Ministries to extend the grace period as the lakhs of illegal expatriates had not been able to complete the paperwork required to get their documents in order during the three-month amnesty period.

The King asked the ministries to resume the campaign against the illegal expats from Muharram 1, 1435 AH, the New Year’s Day according to the Hijra calendar.

The various chambers of commerce in the kingdom, employers’ collectives and NGOs had pressured the Labour Ministry for extending the grace period as getting all the lakhs of illegal expats registered for the regularisation process was proving to be a tough task. Diplomats of several countries had made representations to the Saudi Government. India’s Overseas Indian Affairs Minister and External Affairs Minister had visited Riyadh to ask for relaxing the deadline. Kerala’s Non-Resident Keralites Affairs Minister K.C. Joseph had made a similar request on a trip to Saudi Arabia.

However, it was the inability of the Saudi official machinery to cope with the heavy demand from so many expatriates to correct their status that forced the king to extend the amnesty period. The authorities could not issue exit pass to even one-fourth of the total number of expats who had sought the pass to leave the country.

There are an estimated two million illegal or undocumented expat workers in Saudi Arabia.

They hail from about 100 countries, mainly from South Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia and Yemen.

Many of them have overstayed their visa period intentionally.

Thousands of others had lost their documents and had lived in the kingdom doing underpaid jobs for years together.

The drive to flush out illegal workers was launched along with the strict enforcement of the Nitaqat Saudization programme which stipulates that all companies and employers should earmark a certain percentage of their jobs for the local people.

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