There’s a famous tale of a group of young Pakistani men who, in the early 1990s, left their homes in central Punjab to illegally enter Europe. The men paid hefty sums of money to human traffickers to get a place on trucks operating near the Pakistan-Iran border. 

After entering Iran, the men were put on another truck that crossed into Turkey. They were then ‘unloaded’ in neighbouring Greece. In their bid to reach the more prosperous European countries, the men had to pay even more money to another set of traffickers who were to ‘guide’ them across the former Yugoslavia. 

However, when the young men reached Yugoslavia, it was descending into a vicious civil war. The young men were picked up by various warring militias and forced to fight for them in the war. A majority of the men perished.

Only a handful of them survived. In 2007, I met one of them in Barcelona, where he had found a job as a waiter. He told me he was from Chakwal in Punjab. He said he was forced to fight in the civil war, first for a Croatian militia and then for a Bosnian group. He could not get in touch with his family in Pakistan till 2001, when he reached Spain. 

Economic hardships are not the only reason why Pakistanis are risking their lives to illegally enter Europe

The route that these men were put on was mapped by human traffickers in the 1970s. However, from the 1990s, a more ‘convenient’ route was mapped. This is the route that an estimated over 300 Pakistanis were recently put on, and on which most of them lost their lives when the boat they were on capsized. 

This route begins in Pakistan’s largest city and economic hub, Karachi. Traffickers put young men on a plane to Cairo in Egypt, or they reach Cairo via Dubai. From Cairo, they enter neighbouring Libya, from where they are put on ‘refugee’ boats. The boats then cross the Mediterranean Sea and offload the crammed passengers in Southern Italy. The Pakistani men who drowned had paid an average of Rs 2.5 million each to the human smugglers. 

Filmmakers Farjad Nabi and Meenu Gaur directed an Urdu film in 2013 called Zinda Bhaag. The story was based on the issue of human smuggling. Nabi told me that when he was researching the topic, he discovered that a vast majority of Pakistanis who try to enter Europe reside in cities and towns of either central Punjab or Azad Kashmir.

While many come from lower-middle and working class families, there are quite a few who belong to middle-income groups as well. Nabi told me that young men begin to put pressure on their parents to dish out the money required to pay the smugglers when they find out that a friend, relative or neighbour had succeeded in reaching Europe. 

Exaggerated tales about the ‘fortunes’ made by those who were able to enter Europe further whets their appetite. But as Zinda Bhaag showed, horror stories far outnumber the good ones. Many men die during the journey, while many are arrested, jailed and then deported. Some just simply vanish, never to be heard of or from again. 

The recent tragedy, in which hundreds of young Pakistani men drowned trying to reach Europe, is being covered in a rather one-dimensional manner. The narrative is that economic hardships drove these unfortunate men to risk their lives to explore better livelihood opportunities. There is nothing flawed about this narrative as such. 

However, certain questions do pop up that need to be addressed. A majority of people looking to (illegally) enter Europe are mostly from war-torn regions, especially in Africa and the Middle East. A war is not what Pakistanis are escaping from. So it must be the country’s struggling economy? Indeed, but illegal immigration from Pakistan has been increasing since the 1990s. 

The rate of it would have been high even before the 1990s, but the difference is that, till the early 1980s, migrants from developing countries were actually welcomed by wealthier countries in Europe and the Middle East. After the Second World War, the economies of European countries witnessed a boom and, as a policy, these countries actively acquired cheap labour from poorer countries. 

The economies of various oil-rich Arab countries began to grow from the 1960s and these countries also allowed the entry of labour from various developing countries. Therefore, the need for illegal means to enter wealthier countries was not as prominent as it is today. Between the 1960s and 1980s, thousands of Pakistanis legally immigrated and emigrated to wealthy Arab countries, European countries and to the US. The governments of Pakistan too facilitated this because it became a source of foreign remittances. 

The bulk of those who left Pakistan belonged to Punjab. This is still the case, even though Punjab is the country’s largest, most influential and wealthiest province. Indeed, many from this region leave to escape poverty, but according to the Pakistani researcher Arif Hasan, “There is considerable evidence to suggest that persons emigrating abroad are not the poorest of the poor but those who have skills and higher levels of education. This is because one needs considerable funds in order to emigrate” (SAGE Journal, 2010). This may be the reason why most Pakistani immigrants are from Punjab and not from much poorer provinces such as Balochistan. 

The illegal means to migrate to Europe and to wealthy Arab countries did not fully come into play till the early 1990s. This was more due to the economies of European and Arab countries. According to a 2013 study by the Hellenic Foundation for Foreign Policy, as the post-war economic boom began to recede in Europe and much of the construction work was nearing completion in oil-rich Arab countries, these countries began to introduce tougher immigration laws. 

This is when human smugglers began to make a killing, because the established tradition of Pakistanis immigrating to developed countries did not diminish — despite the fact that it was now facing strict visa regimes and restrictive immigration laws.

Improving Pakistan’s economy is an obvious solution — even rhetorical. Maybe what is equally important is the need to explore a tradition of migration that, in the face of tougher entry laws in wealthy countries, is not abating. It continues to feed the human trafficking business in this part of the world. 

Therefore, there is no guarantee that this tradition will recede even if the economy improves. There are other factors attached to this tradition as well, other than the economy alone.

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 2nd, 2023