The deportee problem

The sheer volume of deportees carries another less obvious difficulty running alongside — that of credibility & trust

Pakistanis are being deported back to their home country from all over the world — 125 countries have deported our citizens since 2013. The vast majority of these were from Saudi Arabia — 140,393 — and another 23,330 from the United Arab Emirates. The UK deported 7,777 and the US 358. Contrary to what is widely assumed in some quarters, countries do not expel people on a whim, and they have responsibilities under a variety of international protocols and treaties to treat people equitably when it comes to deportation no matter what their nationality.

The Gulf and Arab states have by far the highest number of deportees — effectively illegal economic migrants — because that is where the jobs are and all of those deported will have gone to their country of choice in order to better themselves or their family. They may have been unable to find work in Pakistan, or at least work that paid sufficiently well to feed themselves and their extended family, and the lure of a secure income elsewhere is a powerful pull factor. They will be all too aware of the risks involved and will pay whatever price is asked by the ‘fixers’.

The sheer volume of deportees carries another less obvious difficulty running alongside — that of credibility and trust. Increasingly harsh visa conditions imposed by the countries that Pakistani people want to visit or work in are a reflection of that trust deficit. The default position for countries such as the UK and the US is to view applications from Pakistan as potentially fraudulent rather than potentially truthful. A different situation relates to the Arab and Gulf states. There, Pakistan provides a very large proportion of the migrant manual labour that supports the construction boom as well as serves the domestic household labour market. The primary reasons for deportation were passport and visa irregularities and overstays of legal visas and permits. There seems little possibility that anything is going to change in the foreseeable future, and limited opportunity in the homeland is going to drive the stream of illegal migration for many years to come.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 20^th, 2016.

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