Making life easy for emigrants

System set up to facilitate emigrants is in need of reform & we needs to invest in some urgent lifeboat maintenance.

Pakistan has much to thank for to those people who go to the far corners of the globe and then keep the home country afloat on a raft of their remittances. There are 5.9 million of them and it is no exaggeration to say that the foreign exchange that these men and women send back to Pakistan in large part allows the country to avoid defaulting on its foreign debt. The best recent estimate is that they sent home $14.3 billion in 2012-13. The average size of a single remittance is Rs50-60,000, and 90 per cent of families receiving money from abroad fall into this bracket. Those who are working afar often have menial jobs, work in dreadful conditions and are poorly paid compared to the nationals of the country for which they are labouring. They have little or no job security and arguably live little better than if they had stayed at home and found a job.



Such are the numbers working abroad that in 1979 the government set up the office of the Protectorate of Emigrants with the introduction of then Emigration Ordinance 1979. The job of this now long-established office is to facilitate emigrants, keep a record of their location and regulate overseas job promoters — those who are the recruiters and often the exploiters of those working overseas.

It is a tedious job going through the hoops and over the hurdles that confront a potential emigrant worker. They begin at Nadra where they apply for the National Identity Card for Overseas Pakistanis. This is going to cost them anywhere between Rs2,500 and Rs21,800 depending on where they plan to work and the type of card they require. Then there is the passport to be obtained for which fees have to be paid as well as Rs2,000 insurance fees at the protectorate office. The applicant can consider themselves very lucky if they spend less than Rs15,000 just to get the necessary documentation and that is before they have paid fees to agents and middlemen — and these are invariably poor people to start with.

Unsurprisingly there are many complaints by those who are forced to go through the mill. Not the least of these is the length of time they have to spend shuttling from pillar to post, hours or days spent standing in queues and unhelpful officialdom. Some complain that there is an assumption that they are ‘wealthy’ — generally far from being the case.

Considering the support that the Pakistan diaspora gives to the home economy it would seem, at least, appropriate to ease the burdens of those who do so much to ease the burden of the national debt. When questioned, the DG of the Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment defended his position saying that in respect of the insurance that is required to be paid before registration, the monies collected are properly disbursed. In 2013, there were 455 death claims and Rs600 million were paid to the families of those who were insured. As to the question of congestion at NADRA offices — a national problem and not only relating to those seeking to work abroad — there is a proposal in the pipeline to utilise the offices of the Overseas Pakistani Foundation (OPF) to process the cards of emigrants. Against this is the eternal problem of security and the necessity of confirming every piece of paper in what is a very long chain.

Pakistan needs every dollar that is sent back by its emigrant workers and currently ranks tenth in the world for the value of remittances sent home. The system set up to facilitate emigrants is now almost 35 years old and dealing with emigrants in far greater numbers than it was at its inception. The system is in need of reform and streamlining to take account of modern labour movements and Pakistan needs to invest in some urgent lifeboat maintenance.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 25^th, 2014.

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