As many as 40,000 undocumented Bangladeshi expatriates working in United Arab Emirates (UAE) have been legalised in the past four months under a visa amnesty announced by that country’s government. The amnesty will end on December 31. Beside, around 500 undocumented expatriates, who applied for the amnesty at the last moment, failed to receive machine readable passports (MRPs) or failed to get “temporary job seeker visa” were likely to leave the gulf country through “ravel pass”, according to sources in the expatriates’ welfare and overseas employment ministry.

However, after the December 31 deadline for visa amnesty, at least 6,000 expatriate Bangladeshis, who have been legalised so far, are likely to face new challenge to collect “legal job visa” for permanent legal purposes, the sources added.

Bangladesh’s ambassador to UAE, Muhammad Imran, told The Independent that they have been able to legalise at least 40,000 undocumented Bangladeshi expatriates there.

“Of them, there were a number of Bangladeshis who did not have legal documents like passports and visas, even though they were staying in UAE for the last 20 years. They were legalised by arranging job-seeker visas for them for six months,” he said.

“There are few undocumented expatriates who applied for the visa amnesty very late or failed to receiving MRPs. They are likely to be disqualified for the amnesty and have to leave UAE,” he added.

The ambassador said that at least 5,000 to 6,000 Bangladeshi expatriates, who were already legalised under the amnesty, were likely to face problems after six months if they failed to arrange “legal job visa” (also known as permanent job visa) soon. “We have legalised the undocumented Bangladeshi expatriates by arranging job-seeker visas for the interim period. Now, they have to arrange permanent job seeker visas within six months from the companiesconcerned in UAE,” the ambassador added.

He also said there were about seven lakh Bangladeshi expatriates working in UAE for a long time. He further said that there were about 70,000 undocumented expatriates from different countries like Bangladeshi, Philippines and Ethiopia living in UAE. Of them, 40,000 were from Bangladesh.