There can be no doubting the wisdom of the intervention by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah to extend the earlier three-month amnesty for expatriates living and working illegally in the Kingdom.

The immensity of the task before the authorities and all the concerned embassies has meant that it has simply not been possible to process the hundreds of thousands of pieces of documentation in time to meet this week’s deadline.

The king took care to consult carefully with the ministries of foreign affairs, labor and the interior before making his announcement through the Interior Ministry.

There will be those who will say that the whole original time-frame was overly ambitious from the start, which would seem to be borne out by the disruption and concerns that have been caused to business. Economists are still probably working out the extent of the losses caused to the Saudi economy by the sudden disappearance of foreign staff without the proper documentation, who feared that they were about to be caught up in a dragnet by the authorities.

The weeks before Ramadan are normally the busiest of the year for the retail sector, as people buy presents and new clothes and lay in extra supplies of more expensive foodstuffs. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some retailers have struggled to meet demand from their customers, not simply because some of their staff are away, in the process of regularizing their work and residency, but also because wholesalers and delivery firms are suffering from a similar lack of workers.

Yet there is another important side to this, which is that it is now clear that the number of illegal workers in the Kingdom was seriously underestimated. There have been calls for an inquiry into how so many individuals could become lost to the view of the authorities, given the strict controls that are in place on the admission of pilgrims, and the regular tightening of procedures that permit the hiring and entry of foreign workers. Those who look to such an inquiry to apportion blame and perhaps punishment on those, including unscrupulous Saudis who abused and exploited the system, and very often the expatriate workers involved, are probably wrong.

Nevertheless, an inquiry there should be, to establish how the system was manipulated so extensively and to work out how much tighter and more effective controls can be applied. As the Kingdom moves toward greater e-government, it should be possible to apply with relative ease the sort of rigorous immigration systems as those found, for instance, in the US and the UK.

But as they say, we are where we are. With Ramadan almost upon us, despite the assurances from ministries that during the holy month, they would not slacken their efforts to work through their massive workload, it is clear that the major push to sort out the remaining undocumented workers will take place in the two months after Eid.

While King Abdullah’s second wise intervention has brought relief to hundreds of thousands of expatriates who, through bureaucratic delays or maybe their own fault, have still not sorted out their situation in the Kingdom, it must be hoped that this is the last time the warning call will be necessary.

The clear danger is that what is an act of mercy will be taken as a signal by some that this process can be strung out indefinitely. This must not be the case. The law is the law and must be enforced. That this will be done humanely but firmly is likely to be the case, though with so many cases to be processed, it must be feared that some expatriates may suffer through unfortunate errors. Nevertheless one sign of the determination of the government to behave with humanity is the change to the law which will now allow family members of the age of 18 to work in the Kingdom, provided that the legal worker in the family, together with the family members, have spent at least two years here.

Come Nov. 3, when the amnesty period finally ends, it can be expected that this long and difficult process for expatriates, for their countries’ consular staff and for the authorities here in the Kingdom, will have come to an end. At that point, the authorities will have a clear field of operations, in which to identify and pick up all those who somehow imagined that they could get away with continuing to flout the law. In November, they will have run out of time and run out of excuses.