PAM transfer to MoI aims at curbing visa trafficking

The transfer of the affiliation of the Public Authority for Manpower (PAM) to the Ministry of Interior is aimed at cornering visa traders and owners of dummy companies, and confronting the phenomenon of marginal labor, in a bid to cleanse Kuwait’s file in the field of human trafficking.

This follows the arrest made by the Egyptian authorities, in coordination with their Kuwaiti counterpart, of a gang that deals with visa fraud.

A high-level security source said, “A new approach to recruit workers from different countries is being prepared, and the regulations are being amended to organize the recruitment process according to proportion, in a way that contributes to modifying the demographic structure. The government is determined to deal with this file radically, according to several methods, the first of which is to study the labor market and the needs of the development process, and to lay the foundations and criteria for recruiting workers for actual institutions and companies.

There will be legislative, through partial amendment of the private sector labor law and the penal code to set strict penalties against visa traders due to the insufficiency of the current penalties.

This also involves intensifying inspection campaigns and giving the Immigration Investigations and other inspection teams the green light to monitor companies and institutions that recruit labor from abroad, and ensuring their presence in the labor sites of these companies.

The source stressed that it is forbidden to issue new visas to companies that do not report the departure of those whose contract with them had expired.

The source affirmed that the new conditions that will be set for recruitment include the requirement of health insurance from the private sector, not the government, and the need for a drug-free certificate and contracts that guarantee the rights of workers and the employer.