Many readers were upset and wrote letters to the editor yesterday commenting on what Saleh Al-Shehi had written in Al-Watan newspaper. His subject was foreign workers in the Kingdom and the recent raids in Al-Batha in Riyadh. Earlier I had read the Arabic article and despite disagreeing with the writer on several points, I think he must be lauded for bringing up a very real problem facing us in Saudi Arabia: Illegal residents or, as we often call them, overstayers. An article with a similar theme appeared last year in Al-Madinah; it concentrated on the chaos and confusion created by African overstayers in Jeddah and Makkah. Like Al-Shehi, the writer of that article was also criticized for making certain allegedly prejudicial and inhumane statements about the overstayers.
What these readers evidently fail to realize is that the law is the law and that it is being broken. Be it America, France or Saudi Arabia, a country’s laws must be respected and followed. It has long been an open secret that hundreds of thousands of illegal residents live in our major cities. Probably if we could count them all, we would find that their numbers run into the millions. Unlike legal residents — foreigners who have contributed and who continue to contribute to the Kingdom’s development — the illegal residents are a burden on the country’s economy and an obstacle to its development. When several million illegal residents constitute part of a population of some 23 million, that fact should set some alarm bells ringing. The recent raids in Jeddah’s Karantina district — notorious for drugs, prostitution and other illegal activities — where 1,000 people were detained are just the tip of the iceberg. Similar raids in the Al-Batha area of Riyadh netted hundreds of illegal residents, many of whom were dealing in black magic, prostitution, drugs and the copying and sale of pornography. This too is just another tip of the same enormous iceberg.
Other crimes reported in the local press, allegedly committed by illegal residents from a range of different countries, include car theft, mobile snatching, laptop snatching plus all kinds of scams and robberies. Hundreds of thousands of those who end up in the category of illegal residents come to the Kingdom on Umrah visas and never leave. Some even come during the holy months of Ramadan and Haj just to beg. Others come as maids, run away and work with a mob on the black market and receive double or triple of what their legal salary was.
Last year Arab News reported a phenomenon that was on the increase in Riyadh. A taxi with a few passengers — often illegal residents — stops to pick up another passenger. Lured into the taxi by a low fare, the new passenger is tricked into emptying his pockets and robbed. Many of the victims of this scam were legal residents of the Kingdom but they feared being questioned by the authorities and so remained silent.
As a native of Makkah, I know what both the local writers were talking about when they called attention to the dangers of these illegal residents. Makkah itself is full of hundreds of thousands of them; they live in areas that even the police scrupulously avoid. Thus the illegal residents find a safe haven for carrying on their illegal activities.
With millions of illegal residents living among us, the question is: What are we going to do about them? It is impossible to deport all of them. That is simply out of the question. And with our Umrah and Haj visas that still have many loopholes, even if we deported thousands, chances are they would return under other names with new passports.
There are, however, a couple of solutions I think should be considered. We could toughen up our Umrah and Haj visa regulations and require applicants to be fingerprinted upon entry. Another possible measure would be to implement an eye detector test on all people entering the Kingdom. It is a simple test; the person looks into a machine and all related information, including blood type, is automatically stored in a computer. The last and perhaps most humane suggestion would be to integrate many of these illegal residents into our system. In other words, those who have lived here for decades and are overstayers who are familiar with our customs, traditions and language should be given an iqama — legal residency status. A related matter which Al-Shehi wrote about and which I will discuss later relates to the failure of foreign workers to become part of Saudi society. There are a number of reasons for this and it is a matter that needs to be discussed.
