The seven-month amnesty for illegal expatriates in Saudi Arabia to get their job and residency status rectified, and the grace period for Saudi employers to implement the Nitaqat initiative ended on Sunday evening.  

From Monday morning, labour inspectors and police will fan out across the country in a drive to nab the remaining illegal expatriates, to either put them in jail or deport them. One of the most important government programmes in the Kingdom in recent years, these labour-and-immigration reforms have overstretched the official machinery even as their likely impact on the economy is still uncertain.

Saudi media reported that the authorities had announced raids to ferret out illegal workers in the nearly half-a-million registered workplaces that had failed to implement the quotas. Though housemaids, drivers, gardeners and guards make up a large chunk of illegal workers, Saudi homes would be spared of the raids. But, home-owners have been warned of imprisonment and penalty if caught employing illegal house-workers.

Daunting task

Meanwhile, for the administrative machinery, the drive is going to be a daunting task. During the past seven months, the labour, passport and other departments have been struggling to cope with the huge paperwork required to regularize the work and residency permits of millions of illegal expatriates. These offices were hugely understaffed. The Saudi government has estimated that about four million expatriates had got their work and residency status corrected and about a million had left the country on the ‘out pass’ given by the government as their papers could not be corrected.

However, there still are tens of thousands of people, including Indians, to whom the government could not issue the out passes, despite their respective embassies giving them the emergency certificates to apply for these passes. What would happen to them once the law takes effect on Monday is anybody’s guess. Long winding queues of those waiting to get their paperwork done at the Saudi government offices have been a daily reality for months together.

The authorities had clearly underestimated the number of illegal expatriates in the country and the time and effort needed to process the paperwork to regularise their work and stay. This was the main reason for extending the amnesty twice.

Indian embassy statements show that the number of Indians yet to be issued ‘out passes’ would not be very high. But there could be several thousand Indian workers, mainly illiterate ones and those working in faraway regions and distant desert settlements, who have not applied to get their status corrected. They will be in deep trouble.

basheer.kpm@thehindu.co.in

Related Topics