Saudi Gazette report

KUWAIT CITY — In yet another move aimed at reducing the number of expatriates in the country, Kuwait’s Ministry of Interior is set to submit a draft law to the parliament, proposing changes to the county’s residency law, Kuwait Times, a leading English-language daily, reported on Sunday.

According to the report, Kuwait’s Deputy Prime Minister Anas Al-Saleh, who is also the interior minister, said on the national television on Saturday that the government has completed a draft law, proposing to “upgrade the residency law”, which will be sent to the parliament within the next two weeks.

It comes at a time when the parliament is finalizing legislation to facilitate the reduction of expatriates in the country.

The proposed law seeks to draw from experiences in neighboring and advanced countries with an aim to retain only those expatriates who the country needs, the interior minister was quoted as saying without elaborating it.

The minister’s statement is seen as a clear reference to the government’s intention to reduce the number of expatriates in the country, the report claimed.

Meanwhile, the parliament speaker, Marzouq Al-Ghanem, was also quoted as saying that he and a group of lawmakers would submit a comprehensive bill calling for a gradual reduction of expatriates in the country.

The parliament speaker said it is difficult at this stage to impose quotas with specific percentages for different nationalities, in reference to another bill cleared on Thursday by the legal and legislative committee that assigns specific percentages for various foreign communities, according to the report.

The quota bill calls for reducing the number of foreigners — Indians not exceeding 15 percent of the total number of Kuwaitis, while the number of Egyptians, Filipinos and Sri Lankans each not to exceed 10 percent of the Kuwaitis while the quota of the Bangladeshis, Nepalese, Pakistanis and Vietnamese is fixed at 3 percent.

If the bill were to become a law, nearly 800,000 Indians would have to leave Kuwait, as the Indian community constitutes the largest expatriate community in Kuwait, totaling 1.45 million.

The current population of Kuwait is 4.3 million, with Kuwaitis making up 1.3 million of the population, and expatriates accounting for 3 million.

Last month, Kuwait’s Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah Al-Khalid Al-Sabah, proposed decreasing the number of expatriates from 70 percent to 30 percent of the population.