MoI Denies Any Upcoming Amnesty for Visa Violators; PACI Urges Expats to Review Registration Records

In line with the scrapping of residency stickers, and implementation of the use of the updated Civil ID data, the government continues to remind concerned residents to make sure that their residency information is up to date in order to avoid any difficulties during their stay in the country.

Also, with the newly set protocol on residency affairs, expats cannot rely on another amnesty to be given by the government soon. This is because the government is keen on addressing the population imbalance in the state at the moment.

MoI Denies Any Upcoming Amnesty for Visa Violators; PACI Urges Expats to Review Registration Records

No Upcoming Amnesty Planned; Expats Urged to Check Residency Info with PACI

In line with this, the interior ministry’s field security forces are working on rolling out intensive security campaigns in various areas to track down, arrest, and deport residency visa violators, as shared in a report by the Kuwait Times.

As per the report, the government does not have any plans of granting residency visa violators any grace periods this year, with officials alluding to the last amnesty period being not fruitful, as only 57,000 foreign nationals took advantage of it, which was reportedly below target numbers.

Furthermore, based on the ministry’s records, the total number of residency violators is 70,000.  However, the figures in security databases are more than 100,000. Upon checking this discrepancy, officials learned that a majority of these people have been listed for over 25 years ago, meaning many of them had possibly left the country within that period.

Meanwhile, Public Authority for Civil Information Director Musaed Al-Assousi emphasized the importance for expats to double check the information they have submitted to the residency affairs departments in their renewal forms. One was to do this, according to Assousi, is to review the receipts the expats receive from clerks and request immediate correction upon noting any mistakes (misspelling, wrong entries, etc.) on their records before leaving the counter.

Assousi warned expats that failure to check the information entered on their records could result to additional fees for the request to correct any of them, so it’s better to review their records by comparing the information against their passports before they move on with the process.

Leave a Comment