Travelling abroad as a Pakistani can be quite nerve-racking. There is basically no visa-free travel and acquiring visas tends to involve working through mountains of paperwork and long waits, courtesy of the rather poor status of the country’s passport, and even after all this one can expect awkward questions by airline staff and travel authorities when they reach the airport. However, what has usually not been in question is that one will eventually get on their flight. A visa application can get rejected, but if it goes through, one should be OK. That assumption no longer seems as safe as it once did. On Monday, it was announced that the prime minister has ordered the formation of a committee to investigate the frequent offloading of passengers from international flights, despite them holding valid documents. The committee will prepare recommendations on the safe migration of people and is expected to issue proposals on this issue by the end of January, 2026. Following the announcement, the FIA director general told parliament on Wednesday that 66,154 passengers were offloaded this year. This is a sharp increase from 35,000 last year. The FIA clarified that 51,000 of those individuals were stopped due to questionable veracity of travel documents falling into three main categories: work visas, tourist visas and Umrah visas. Most of these cases appear to involve individuals from poorer regions, where the desperation to leave the country is highest, making them prime targets for human smugglers.
Officials have defended the stringent measures as necessary to curb human trafficking and protect Pakistan’s international standing. In recent years, illegal migration and human smuggling have brought large numbers of increasingly desperate Pakistanis to Europe and South East Asia and everywhere in between. One scheme even involved a fake football team that tried to smuggle people into Japan. According to data shared with parliament, 24,000 Pakistanis travelled to Cambodia this year, of whom 12,000 had not yet returned. Similarly, 4,000 individuals went to Myanmar on tourist visas, with 2,500 still unaccounted for. There also appears to have been a sharp rise in Pakistanis being deported from the Gulf countries, with 56,000 Pakistanis involved in organized begging recently deported from Saudi Arabia, 6000 from Dubai and 2500 from Azerbaijan. This is a rather alarming trend because much of our remittances come from these countries and they were among the few where it was still relatively easy for Pakistanis to travel to.
However, none of this means that it is alright to arbitrarily offload passengers from flights. Even with the rise of illegal migration, it is still the case that most Pakistanis travelling abroad are doing so through the proper channels and for legitimate purposes. To discriminate against someone simply because they are from a poor, rural district is not right. Thankfully, lawmakers seem to agree with this sentiment, calling for enforcement to be paired with an accessible redressal channel so that genuine travellers who were wrongly offloaded may obtain rapid relief and a clear SOP for offloading. The Lahore High Court has also issued a stern reminder to the authorities that any person offloaded or restrained from travelling must be provided with written reasons. It is also heartening to note that an e-immigration (EMI) application is set to be launched by mid-January that will allow travellers to obtain immigration clearance up to 24 hours prior to departure. It must be noted that heightened scrutiny should come at the stage where people are actually applying for travel documents, not at the airport, where legitimate and illegitimate are all mixed and the decision is up to the whims of any officer. These are precisely the circumstances that create opportunities for corruption. Collective or arbitrary punishment/enforcement will only push more desperate people into the hands of the illegal networks the country is trying to root out.
