As the government is keen on addressing the country’s demographic imbalance and labour allocation in favour of its citizens, concerned ministries and departments are also doubly working hard in tracking residency violators who have long been in the country illegally.
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This move comes at a time when the government is curbing the entry of foreigners in the country for the upcoming Holy Month of Ramadan, when people are expected to perform charitable acts in service of the poor by imposing the need for health insurance among tourists and dependents of expats entering Kuwait.
Over 120,000 Residency Violators Tracked Down by Interior Ministry
In line with this, an estimated 120,000 foreign nationals of both genders have been discovered to be in violation with Kuwait’s residency law, as shared in a report by the Kuwait Times.
According to the report, these violators include those who previously possessed valid residencies, as well as those who came to Kuwait on visit or work visas and violated the law. At this point, security efforts are in progress to curb their numbers through inspection campaigns and other measures.
Furthermore, the deportation department will not consider violators with expired Article 18 residencies until three months have elapsed, since their violations were entered in the interior ministry’s computer systems.
As for Article 20 residency holders (domestic helpers), the department will only accommodate them days after they are reported missing, with the possibility that the sponsor can correct the helper’s situation.
At present, the deportation department has already dealt with 620 violators, including 18 women, in the past few days. The department’s capacity is a maximum of 800 of both genders.
In other related news, authorities have urged domestic labour offices to recruit workers from other countries aside from the Philippines, in order not to rely entirely on one or two sources of foreign workers.
Because of this, human traffickers without coordination or government control scrambled to the African countries such as Burundi, Rwanda, Madagascar, Mali, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire and the Congo, all of which have no embassies in Kuwait to care for their citizens.
And as the government imposes strict and clear regulations to control the organized trafficking of the home employment recruiting offices, non-government agencies such as the Kuwait Human Friendship Society has supported the government by providing humanitarian assistance for the return of a large number of workers who were sent for deportation, and shouldered their ticket expenses and provided their children with some gifts.