Once upon a time there was a lion that lived in the jungles of India. He was a very clever lion and was renowned for his strength and valor throughout the land. However, as the lion population had begun to increase so too had his share of meat fallen accordingly and although he had just enough to sustain himself, he was desirous of more. One of his pride alerted his attention to an advertisement in the local newspaper. “Lions required in Saudi Arabia!” beckoned the title. The offer seemed to promise an unimaginable amount of meat and the lion felt eager to experience the carnivorous delights of this mystical desert kingdom.
Upon his arrival at the Jeddah Zoo, the lion was filled with anticipation at the prospect of unlimited free meat without having to hunt in the jungle. “This is the life!” he mused to himself while basking outstretched in the desert sun. When the keeper finally arrived with his evening meal, the lion expectantly pounced upon the dish but roared in astonishment as he found not a trace of meat, but instead a pile of nuts. “There must be some mistake!” he reasoned trying to console himself and attempted to satiate his enormous appetite with a sampling of the pathetic fare.
The next morning he awoke ravenously to the anticipation of finding a huge portion of meat dripping with juices awaiting him inside the cage. To his utter disgust, there, once again, in a pile at the edge of the cage was a collection of nuts! By now he was quite famished and devoured them in spite of his anger.
“Where is the meat I had been assured of?” he wondered in self-pity. By the second morning the lion, pacing frantically back and forth across the cage, was now raging with hunger and decided to accost the zoo-keeper on his morning round.
Upon seeing the fresh delivery of peanuts, the lion roared ferociously and exclaimed: “Where is the meat I had been promised? How dare you treat me this way? Don’t you know who I am? I am Lion. King of the Jungle,” he bellowed dramatically. “And you have the audacity to feed me nuts?”
“You may be lion, king of the jungle,” quipped the keeper, “but you came here on a monkey’s visa!”
Indeed, there are an inordinate number of lions here that started off their professional life within the Kingdom on monkey status. Much of this confusion is due to the fact that in the Eastern Hemisphere, the visa market is thriving and yet typically those much-coveted documents for sale are classified under the “Labor” category. This has all sorts of implications for potential customers who are rarely well informed about them.
There are many, especially in the Asian Subcontinent who harbor the earnest belief that the streets of Saudi Arabia are paved with gold and are therefore willing to suffer the consequences even if they are aware of these problems. Visas in countries like India change hands for inordinate sums of money, sometimes so huge that one wonders what the benefit is of these poor people pawning everything they have in order to spend half their life away from home in an attempt to pay it all back.
I know of many cases of people who have been caught up in this trap. The touts claim to have a Saudi visa, which for many appears to be a carte blanche to prosperity, and then auction off this guarantee of success to the highest bidder. No money? No problem! These unscrupulous entrepreneurs then introduce you to a modern day Shylock who lends you the money at an extortionate rate of interest in the underlying hope that you will never be able to pay it back.
The visa system in this country is most definitely in need of revision. We can’t just consistently turn a blind eye to how such papers are procured. Admittedly, this racket has beneficiaries at both ends, and the authorities need to recognize their complicity by choosing to ignore the machinations of this illegal visa trade. Tighter restrictions and severe penalties for those abusing the system must be effected. Is it not enough that such naive and trusting individuals are exploited when they arrive that we have to subject them to a taster of what lies ahead before they even board the plane that will bring them here?
There are several people who have been employed for work other than that which their visa claims. This of course is subject to which particular visa is available at the time. As an employer, for example, you may be able to obtain a permit issued for a laborer when in actual fact you need an administrator. This results in bringing the required person in on a different visa to that of his or her profession. The number of individuals employed on these visas of convenience is huge. Would it then not be more sensible to produce a more generic visa that specifies the place of employment rather than the actual status of the person employed? What is after all the purpose of such a system if it is ultimately self-defeating?
Indeed, there are those who are so desperate to enter the Kingdom that they don’t mind arriving on a cleaner’s visa in spite of their superior qualifications that could lend them to being utilized in better positions with more promising prospects. An acquaintance of mine who heads a large engineering firm spoke of this phenomenon recently. He apprised me of the fact that many technical and skilled vacancies are advertised internally, and was literally staggered at the qualifications that many of the menial workers in his organization possessed. However, when faced with the prospect of promoting these employees into more senior positions, the sponsors refused to pay them extra wages citing the fact that they were hired on cleaner status in the first place and so regardless of what other tasks they were required to do, should subsequently be on the original salary they were brought in at.
But there are also those unsuspecting individuals I have met who have been recruited from their countries on attractive terms and conditions only to find out once they have arrived that they have been given the wrong visa. An acquaintance of mine with a very senior position in one of the top firms here arrived from the US on a laborer’s status. The reason proffered (although it has now been several years and the situation remains to be redressed) is that there had been some administrative blunder. As if this was not bad enough, adding further insult to injury, his wife who still lives in America and is Chinese, was given a maid’s visa! Now every time she arrives in the Kingdom with their children she is harassed at the airport and bombarded with a series of facile and unnecessary questions at the Immigration counter (which of course is a law unto itself). How is it after all that this Filipina maid had the temerity to marry a mere worker and be granted that all-coveted American passport?
Evidently there are many simple and yet pervasive initiatives that can be taken in order to alleviate the frustrations of many. What remains to be seen is whether we have the creativity and lateral thinking required to define and implement them. As the adage goes, anywhere else in the world, if you pay peanuts you get monkeys. But here, you pay monkeys to get peanuts!
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—(Lubna Hussain is a Saudi writer. She is based in Riyadh.)
