Pakistan’s human exports

September 6, 2024

ISLAMABAD – These days, travel to any European capital — Athens, Rome or Paris, for example — and you will see groups of immigrants huddled together on the streets and in the alleys, bleary-eyed and haunted. If one walks by them slowly enough, it is possible to catch bits and pieces of Urdu and Punjabi. That’s how you know they are from Pakistan. These are the ‘lucky’ ones — the ones who have made it to Europe alive. Many more like them never make it.

A new report on human smuggling in Pakistan, published by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan last week, outlines the journey of one such migrant from Hafizabad in Punjab. Like hundreds of thousands of others, he paid an agent to smuggle him out of the country. The report details how a person is passed from agent to agent until they manage to get to the EU or North America.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that Pakistani migrants have been discovered in such faraway places as the Darién Gap — the only land bridge between North and South America, through which a dangerous route runs between northern Colombia and southern Panama and ultimately leads to the United States border areas. From there, migrants often make a run for what they imagine will be a better life.

In Europe, Pakistani migrants can often be found languishing in places like the island of Lampedusa, off the coast of Italy. Many of them arrive there via Egypt or Libya, where smugglers put them on boats with a promise to get them to the Italian coast. It was smugglers like these who had lured the 20 Pakistanis that died last summer off the coast of Greece, when a migrant vessel holding hundreds of people was allowed to sink by the Greek coast guard.

As an aside, it seems worth