Many may not know that the cost of a middle-class family, consisting of a father, a mother, and three children, especially state employees, on public money is close to one million dinars during one generation and sometimes much more than that.

There is a high percentage that obtained and is still receiving work and retirement salaries in thousands of dinars over a period of 60 years, the total of which exceeds one million dinars, not to mention the salaries of the wife, sons and daughters, before marriage, and the allowance of fifty dinars for each child, allowances for caring for a disabled, caring for the elderly, Afiya insurance inside and outside Kuwait, rent allowance, marriage gift of 6,000 dinars, a housing loan of 70,000 dinars and a house renovation loan, subsidies for building materials, fuel, electricity and water, free education up to PhD, free medical care and medicine, and a subsidy for the university student, and other grants and rewards, other than the residential land grant, are almost free of charge, and all of them cost public money huge sums for one family that you will not find in any country.

From all of this, we see that Kuwaiti citizenship is really expensive, and adding ten or twenty thousand new families to the current number of citizens is not an easy decision, in light of the erosion of state resources and the expected drop in oil prices.

All countries of the world, even the rich, suffer from the problem of illegal residents and Kuwait is no exception, but rather it is the best, most just and generous in dealing with them.

No country has dealt with the bedouns as Kuwait did, which made them equal to the citizen in everything except political rights and the right to own property.

Had there been no monitoring and addressing body for the situation of the bedoun, the situation would have been much more dangerous than that, knowing that our small size, area and population, and the sensitivity of our demographics should make us more cautious.

Therefore, it is dangerous to hand over the issue of the bedoun to the National Assembly, as each member has whims and desires that may push him in this direction or the other, and therefore it is better for the issue to remain in the hands of a neutral party, such as the Central Agency for Remedying the Status of Illegal Residents under the supervision of brother Saleh Al-Fadhalah.

I do not disagree with the humanitarian approaches of some defenders of the bedoun cause, and those who demand justice for them, but the truth is that not everyone who is registered in the 1965 census is sincere in his “non-affiliation”, or does not hide his true nationality.

It is also not correct to say that whoever, we know his nationality of, can ask his government to take him over, as almost everyone knows how difficult it is to impose this matter on the regimes of the countries of the region, and to demand that they take their citizens.

 We are not more patriotic than others, nor are we more caring for the identity of the nation, nor are we less willing to end the bedoun issue and close this file, for we are tired and they are tired. However, we must realize that the settlement cannot take place by satisfying the desires and whims, but rather according to the laws of the state, which are represented in the official and documented statements of the Central Agency and not with any other party.

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By Ahmad alsarraf