The Bangladeshi Embassy in Riyadh has called for an extension of the amnesty period as it has not been able to legalize about 400,000 of its nationals according to Saudi residency laws.
The next few weeks will witness an influx of workers who need to correct their residency status, said Dr. Muhammad Imdadul Haque, labor consultant for the embassy, reports Saudi Gazette.
“There is no way the embassy can handle this large number of workers before the amnesty ends,” Haque was quoted by Al-Eqtisadiah daily as saying.
Saudi authorities will undoubtedly deport the noncompliant workers if the embassy does not process their documents, he added. Those workers in violation of residency laws will solely bear the consequences of their actions if they do not show up at the embassy soon and rectify their status.
There are 1.5 million workers from Bangladesh working in the Kingdom. Haque said over 350,000 workers have corrected their status since last May, while 25,000 have received final exits after failing to abide by pertinent laws.
Meanwhile, the deputy chairman of the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s contractors committee has blamed the Ministry of Labor’s slow electronic processing for the delay in regularizing the residency status of illegal workers in the contracting industry.
Raed Al-Aqili said over the past seven months only a fifth of paperwork has been processed and completed, stressing that the contractors industry needs more than three years to regularize the market, especially in the absence of recruitment companies that hire out workers to contracting companies on hourly and daily bases.
Al-Aqili said: “The majority of contracting companies have failed to correct the residency status of their workers during the amnesty period. “It takes a long time to process and complete paperwork for expatriate labor.”
Source: UNBConnect
