The social tragedy of Pakistan’s boat migrants

For years now, the tragic news of boats carrying illegal Pakistani migrants sinking in waters off the coast of the Mediterranean has made headlines. Most recently, 16 Pakistanis drowned this week and 13 last month, in addition to 40 murdered by human traffickers. Only from last December to the second week of February this year, no less than four boats capsized, hitting the rocks and sinking with the weight of too many passengers. So far this year, more than 100 people have already lost their lives in the act, and hundreds have been rescued. The majority of them stay back in hiding in the coastal country to give it yet another try.

Last year in June, in a single accident, 300 Pakistanis went down under the water, with very few bodies to be found. The same year in February, 54 had died, and then in December, 40 more followed them underwater. Each time, the government machinery has been active in the media with reports of ‘cracking down’ on human smugglers, the Pakistani agents involved in running an international network of traffickers to Europe and even North America. A few are arrested to show the efficiency of the authorities, but the tragedies have never stopped occurring. Some of the reports suggest that the government dismissed 50 Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) officials responsible for screening and scrutinizing passengers before they board the planes or cross the border. Regular purges, transfers, and demotions seem not to have deterred the collusion between traffickers and FIA personnel. Otherwise, the incidents of Pakistan’s illegal immigrants would have been few and far between. 

There is hardly any data on how many leave undetected, landing successfully on the other side of the ocean. The rush for such a migration can be gauged from the fact that just in January and only at Lahore airport, according to a newspaper report, the FIA offloaded 2,500 passengers on suspicion of going to Saudi Arabia for begging or taking boats to Europe across the Mediterranean. 

There are social factors more than economic ones that are pushing young men and their supportive families to take the illegal and dangerous route to a life in Europe. This seems to be happening primarily in a few districts of Central Punjab from where overwhelming numbers of those who have drowned or rescued hail.

The FIA offloaded 2,500 air passengers last month on suspicion of going to Saudi Arabia to beg and cross into Europe.

Rasul Bakhsh Rais

Many of these migrants do not come from wealthy families but spend millions to pay traffickers, buying tickets and saving for the journey. Rationally speaking, why would people invest all these millions in such a risky enterprise with the constant possibility of getting apprehended, going to prison, being killed, being tortured to extract more money from families and dying on the seas?

There are demonstrative effects of the ‘new riches’ of the successful Pakistani diaspora from the central Punjab in the Scandinavian countries and Britain first, and now almost in every part of Europe, Canada and America. In this region, one can see massive, palatial houses, often vacant, and big cars parked on the porches with security guards because of the fading of the first generation of immigrant owners. Even the second generation is sickeningly ostentatious in spending on weddings or other social occasions, making extravagance a cultural mark of success. The stories of how they gained wealth go round and round, motivating others to get to the West at any cost and become one of the heroes of the often concocted fables of the rags-to-rich crowd. 

In the end, the fleeing of so many is a state failure in many ways, not least of all, in holding the officialdom and human traffickers accountable for illegal migration. 

If you visit local communities, everybody knows who the traffickers are and how they lure people into their traps. It becomes a national story only when a tragedy strikes, with some action here and there, until another boat goes down.

- Rasul Bakhsh Rais is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS, Lahore. His latest book is “Islam, Ethnicity and Power Politics: Constructing Pakistan’s National Identity” (Oxford University Press, 2017).

X: @RasulRais