The Ministry of Interior (MoI) is considering a Federal National Council (FNC) proposal that visitors to the UAE will have to furnish a clean police record and a bank statement from their country of origin, senior immigration officials told Khaleej Times on Monday.

Ministry figures show that 80 per cent of pickpockets and thieves, nabbed in recent crimes, entered the country on tourist and business visas.

Brigadier Nasser Al Awadhi Al Minhali, Acting Director General of Naturalisation and Residency Department at the ministry, said the restrictions under consideration would be applicable for visit, business and tourist visas.

“General Shaikh Saif bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Minister of Interior, has issued these directives calling for studying the proposal of the FNC, and take action on it as soon as possible, if the new restrictions prove practical and realistic,” he said.

“The Naturalisation and Residency departments in the country have arrested many criminals, the majority of whom had entered the country on visit, tourist and business visas. This has prompted the department to chalk out new steps, including the ones proposed by the FNC,” the minister said.

Major General (retired) Ali Majid Al Matroushi, a member of the FNC and the Chairman of the Internal and Defence Affairs ad-hoc committee in the House, told Khaleej Times the high statistics had been taken seriously and prompted the recommendations…SOURCE

FNC calls for tightening of sponsorship rules

12/17/2008 12:02 AM | By Samir Salama, Associate Editor

Abu Dhabi: The Federal National Council (FNC) on Tuesday proposed increasing the minimum salary requirement to sponsor families of expatriates in the UAE.

According to the proposal, the minimum salary required for an expatriate – without company accommodation – to sponsor a family should be Dh10,000 and an expatriate with company accommodation, Dh8,000. The FNC resumed its session yesterday after National Day and Eid holidays.

An ad-hoc committee of the House also suggested that family-visa applicants should be asked to submit bank statements of six months, detailing salary transfer.

In its first ever open session to discuss the demographic structure of the UAE since its establishment in 1972, the House also suggested that an only an expatriate with a minimum salary of Dh15,000 should be allowed to sponsor housemaids.

It also recommended increasing the annual fee for sponsoring a housemaid to Dh7,000.

According to a report worked out by the committee, there are 5.5 million foreign workers, including 3.1 million workers registered with the Ministry of Labour and 2.4 million registered with the Ministry of the Interior, while the total population was 6.3 million by the end of last year.

The legislature said the Labour Ministry issued 640,000 work permits over the first four months of this year, an increase of 100 per cent compared with the same period last year.

These include 525,000 work permits for individual workers and 115 group permits.

The House expected that 1.920 million permits would be issued by the end of this year, taking into account the visas issued by the Ministry of Interior.

The House was told that foreign workers account for 90 per cent of the total workforce in the UAE at the end of 2006.

Asian workers represented 87.1 of the labour force, while workers of other nationalities including Arabs account for 12.9 per cent.

An estimated 98.7 per cent are concentrated in the private sector, namely in the construction, agriculture, retail business, and also restaurants, hotels, fisheries, security and guarding and cleaning companies…