The highway overpasses and tunnels of Jeddah remain home to hundreds and possibly thousands of foreigners living in breach of residency and labor laws. Some have stayed in the Kingdom beyond the permitted length of pilgrimage visas, while others have legal work visas but whose sponsors have told them to seek employment elsewhere, demanding on top a monthly commission. Others have fled abusive sponsors. Many seek deportation home at the expense of the Passports Department which periodically sends out buses to pick them up, but the numbers involved and the complications arising from identity difficulties and bureaucratic procedures prolong operations. The Jeddah spokesman for the Passports Department says his officials conduct frequent campaigns to ensure that persons in violation of labor and residency laws were taken to Deportation Administration headquarters to be checked for eligibility, but the issue, he says, is becoming an inherited lifestyle for some nationalities. “The increasing numbers of illegal residents and workers taking to living under bridges and overpasses and on wasteland has almost become a way of life passed on within communities,” said spokesman Abdulrahman Al-Husseini. “The department has designated pickup points to make deportation easier after they've been fingerprinted and checked for criminal records.” The head of the Recruitment Office in Jeddah Saeed Al-Ghamdi says that bringing in foreign workers and allowing them to seek work wherever they please was causing a “pile up of people” in all the country's cities. “Circumstances make them feel resentful of the rest of society and that affects security,” Al-Ghamdi said. “We need to find a way to carry out the continual deportation of workers in violation of the law. We also need to tackle shop owners who get their fellow nationals to work for them.” Mohammed Rahman is a Pakistani national living under an overpass. “I didn't come here to live under a bridge, I came looking for work, but I haven't found anyone who'll give me a job or any way to make money,” he said. Underneath the overpass, workers gather at certain points each day from where they are picked up by employers seeking unskilled laborers to work at construction sites across the city. Here there is no sign of a Passports Department presence. Police patrols sometimes arrive to tackle security or criminal concerns, but deportation is out of their jurisdiction. Whenever Egyptian Qutb Abu Zaina sees the police pass by he looks up in the hope that they stop so he can be taken away for deportation back to his homeland. “I was in a position where I couldn't find enough work to eat and drink,” he said, “so these days I'll do any sort of work for money. I'll be living here until things change, as I have nowhere to go and no relations I can turn to.”
