Abdo Khal

Okaz

The superfluous recruitment policy has saturated the Kingdom with about eight million expatriates. This is the accepted number for only the legal foreign manpower. Nobody knows the exact number of illegal ones. The majority of the foreign workers in the Kingdom are not skilled. They have been placed in positions that require qualified personnel.



The absence of laws that would protect both the employer and the employees has led to a great flight among the foreign manpower in the quest for higher pay. The foreign workers are willing to do jobs for which they are not qualified only to get better salaries than those offered by their original sponsors.



There was a time when the selling of work visas constituted huge returns for Saudi citizens. An individual could get as many as 1,000 work visas to recruit foreign manpower and release them into the market.



All officials, big and small, were aware of this problem but had no solution for it. Their failure led to the random campaigns launched by the passport police to nab illegal foreigners. There should be a conscious decision that would end this problem once and for all.



The combined campaigns between the passport police and the Labor Ministry launched last week unveiled the depth of the problem. Many private schools, clinics, groceries, restaurants and other facilities were closed down. Work in shopping malls was disrupted. Construction work in a number of buildings came to a standstill. Blacksmiths, carpentry and car workshops came to a halt.



It is without a shadow of doubt that we have a real problem in our hands that must be corrected if we want our country on the right track. The campaign revealed to us that we are living outside the realm of the law and that when the law began to be enforced, many activities were stopped.



This does not mean that we should stop these campaigns. These are correctional steps that have to continue without any slackness or lassitude. There should also be auxiliary plans to support the campaigns.



We should give time to foreigners working away from their sponsors to correct their situation. The iqama should not be clipped just because the foreign worker was caught in the wrong place. The iqama is an official document that should be respected and protected against clipping even if by the very government department that had issued it. The sponsored individual should be given time to explain his situation, especially since many are literally the slaves of their sponsors.



Recruitment of foreign manpower should be stopped for a while until the current manpower is redistributed and accommodated in their new positions. If there is any negative aspect to the campaigns it is that the authorities have not warned the citizens beforehand. However, there is no reason to stop the ongoing campaigns, and both the sponsors and the sponsored should be given time to correct their situations.



The slogans of this campaign could be: We are operating in an illegal manner and the country will be in jeopardy if the foreign workers stopped working. This underlines the need to create our own national manpower at any cost. If left unresolved, the problems may snowball into disaster. Leaving problems unattended will be perilous to the country.