DAMMAM, 21 July — When 19 Indians with fake visas in their passports recently tried to enter the Kingdom via Dammam’s King Fahd International Airport(KFIA), immigration authorities detained them for questioning in an attempt to bust a visa racket believed to be operating on an international scale.
Organized gangs are known to have been based in the Subcontinent, the Philippines, Egypt and a number of African countries for some time. However, what Saudi officials are focusing on mostly is the question of how laborers have consistently managed to clear emigration in their own countries.
Is there an arrangement between the criminal gangs there and a small number of corrupt officials?
Saudi immigration authorities have now tightened up the procedure for checking visas at KFIA, King Abdul Aziz International Airport in Jeddah and Riyadh’s King Khaled International Airport. But the situation is made more complicated by the fact that the laborers themselves usually have no idea that their Saudi visas are forged. Both the guest workers and officials are being duped.
To understand why the visa racket is so widespread, you have to look at the history of immigration to the Gulf. In the 1970s and 1980s the massive infrastructure projects in the Kingdom and elsewhere necessitated recruitment of foreign workers in every sector.
As a result, in developing countries money sent home from citizens who had found work here became a major source of revenue. It both reduced budget deficits and gave an injection to foreign exchange reserves.
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Egypt, Sudan and many other developing countries, eager to maintain this inflow of hard currency, often turned a blind eye to malpractices regarding official regulations: a little forgery, a little by-passing of the rules, were minor issues when weighed against the money those workers would bring back home.
In India and Pakistan, for instance, rules were introduced specifying minimum wages for those recruited to work in Saudi Arabia. Both countries also enacted several laws to streamline recruitment procedures and evolve a code of ethics to govern the newly established recruitment agencies.
None of these regulations were ever implemented in practice. Hundreds of stories have subsequently appeared in the local newspapers in these countries about the exploitation of their nationals working in the Gulf, and how they are routinely duped into paying huge sums for visas and accepting poor working conditions by local recruiting agents.
The extent of exploitation is so pervasive that stories often border on the farcical. For instance, recruitment agents in India fly laborers from Delhi and Bombay to the desert area of neighboring Jaipur, and tell them they are now in the Gulf region.
Of course, it would be easy to laugh; but for the laborers themselves it is no laughing matter: most are undertaking the first journey outside their villages.
Some three quarters of workers from developing countries in the Gulf are unskilled laborers. They frequently have had to sell their land, houses and even jewelry in order to raise enough cash to pay for a visa. To many Arabs and Westerners, the very idea of buying a visa sounds ridiculous. But in the developing world, it is general practice. For these laborers, job visas for the Gulf countries come at a premium.
In India and Pakistan, the cost can be as much as SR6,000. Many Saudi managers became millionaires almost overnight after reaping the profits from these visa sales.
Given the amount of money involved, and the level of corruption in many developing countries, the emergence of visa rackets was almost an inevitability. It usually works like this: a company gets a bulk number of visas and authorizes a manager — typically from the country for which the visas have been issued — to issue them.
The manager contacts local recruiting agents, who bid for the visas. The highest bidder gets the contract to supply the manpower.
This practice is illegal, but known to the authorities both here and in the home countries.
It is in this context, where the issuing of visas has become big business, that racketeering has taken hold. Bogus outfits offer laborers visas at much cheaper prices than the official bidding companies. The only problem is that the cheaper visas are not authentic.
As with the 19 Indians arrested at KFIA, the result is that those who have spent their life savings in the hope of earning a relatively high fortune in the Gulf have to return home, humiliated, empty handed and branded as criminals.
