New rights for non-Saudi moms may benefit Saudi mothers, too

The Saudi government’s decision granting foreign mothers of Saudi children more rights still falls short of providing full citizenship, but it’s a cause for celebration and brings foreign women within a hairsbreadth of the rights that Saudis enjoy today.
According to the decision, foreign mothers of Saudi children are given permanent residency and will receive all health and educational services accorded to Saudis. The mother will be allowed to work for any employer in the private sector and be included in Saudization. She will be treated as a Saudi to enroll in general and university education programs. The intent of the ruling is to encourage non-Saudi mothers to remain in the Kingdom with their children and to keep the family together.
The ruling also removes the stipulation that Saudi children of foreign mothers must be the mother’s sponsors as part of the Iqama requirement. It also deletes the requirement that sponsors must assume non-Saudi widows’ living expenses if she is unable to provide for herself.
Unspoken, but certainly a key consideration for foreign women, is that the law provides leverage in custody issues, particularly in divorce cases where Saudi men may attempt to deny foreign mothers the right to have access to their children. It also drops the sponsorship issue. Women are no longer forced to leave Saudi Arabia, a country they have called home for decades.
Yet the new laws don’t go far enough because they don’t resolve the citizenship issue. Citizenship for non-Saudis remains elusive. According to amendments approved in January 2012 and enforced by the Interior Ministry’s Civil Affairs department, foreign women must have at least 17 points to be granted citizenship.
Under the current system, foreign women who have at least one Saudi relative earn two points. If the foreign woman was born in Saudi Arabia, she gets two points. She earns another two points if she lived in the Kingdom before her marriage.
The system is not equitable because it gives preference to foreign Arab wives and mothers over Western women because of the likelihood of an Arab women living in Saudi Arabia before marriage or over a longer period of time than a Westerner. I’m not sure what is so hard about granting citizenship for foreigners. Surely, men and women living in the country for 30-plus years are entitled to some consideration.
Expats have always felt that Saudi citizenship is an unattainable goal. Last year’s amendments to the citizenship rules and this week’s decision to grant wider freedoms to non-Saudi mothers do not really address these obstacles. But Saudi Arabia is not one to take bold steps and considers citizenship an area that one must tread lightly.
I prefer to view the new rights given to non-Saudi mothers of Saudi children as another step to permanent and equitable solution for foreign women married to Saudis to achieve citizenship.
By the same token, I see these steps as moving toward the goal of giving Saudi wives of foreign husbands citizenship to their children, and that due consideration be given to the situation of their husbands. Saudi wives still face deep discrimination for their choices of a husband, and their children are the ones who suffer because, unlike children of Saudi men, they are denied citizenship by birth.
In some small measure by granting more rights to non-Saudi mothers, Saudi mothers can also achieve similar goals.
I dream of the day when the children of a Saudi mother are given citizenship by birth, then when they reach the age of 18, they can decide for themselves whether they want to keep the Saudi citizenship or take that of their father. My guess, children of Saudi mothers will choose Saudi Arabia as their home because we, mothers, are the ones who teach love and shape personalities.