Pakistan Is Living on Its Migrants

Pakistan’s economy is being kept alive by people who no longer live in it.

Every month, millions of Pakistanis working in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Europe, and North America send money home so their parents can buy medicine, their children can stay in school, and their families can survive rising prices. These remittances now exceed $40 billion a year, making them the single largest source of foreign exchange for the country.

This is not a sign of national strength. It is a sign of national displacement.

A country that depends on remittances depends on absence. It survives because its people had to leave in order to survive themselves. Behind every transfer is a story of someone who wanted to build a future in Pakistan — and could not.

The invisible backbone of the economy

Pakistani migrants do not live easy lives abroad. In the Gulf, many works long hours in construction, transport, retail, and services under extreme heat and strict conditions. In Europe and North America, professionals drive taxis, work double shifts, and rebuild their careers from scratch. Doctors, engineers, IT specialists, and academics often accept positions far below their qualifications just to secure stability for their families.

They are not just contributing to Pakistan. They are contributing to the economies of the countries they live in — paying taxes, filling labour shortages, staffing hospitals, building infrastructure, and keeping industries running. In many cities across the world, Pakistani workers and professionals have become indispensable.

And yet, even while supporting other economies, they remain the silent financiers of their own.

How diaspora dollars prop up the economy

Pakistan today imports more than twice what it exports. Goods worth over $60 billion come in every year, while exports struggle to reach even half that amount. Foreign investment remains modest — far below what is needed to build new industries or generate enough jobs for a young and fast-growing population.

The gap between what Pakistan buys from the world and what it sells to the world is now being filled by remittances.

In simple terms, the savings of Pakistani workers in Riyadh, Dubai, Doha, London, and New York are paying for Pakistan’s fuel, food, machinery — and increasingly, for luxury consumption.

This is not how strong economies function. In successful countries, imports are paid for by exports and investment. In Pakistan, they are being paid for by family sacrifice.

And where does that money go?

Not into factories that can sell to the world.

Not into industrial clusters that can employ millions.

Not into technology that can raise productivity.

Instead, much of it disappears into consumption and a costly State structure — imported vehicles, fuel, protocol culture, fleets of official cars, foreign travel, and large offices that generate little economic return.

While a construction worker in the Gulf labours under a desert sun and a nurse in Europe works night shifts, their remittances help finance a system at home that consumes far more than it produces.

This is the real injustice: Pakistan is not poor — it is misallocating the wealth created by its own people abroad.

When the State depends on those who leave

The uncomfortable truth is that Pakistan’s economic system has adapted to migration instead of preventing it.

When industries struggle because electricity is expensive, taxes are unpredictable, and regulations are arbitrary, young people leave. When graduates cannot find dignified work, they leave. When professionals cannot plan for the future, they leave.

And when they leave, their remittances help stabilise the very system that pushed them out. This creates a cruel cycle: failure produces emigration, emigration produces remittances, and remittances reduce the pressure to fix the failure.

Pakistan maintains a large State machinery devoted to trade, investment, and development — ministries, boards, missions, and delegations housed in expensive offices, travelling the world. Yet the returns are thin. Exports remain weak. Foreign investment is limited. Manufacturing struggles. Industrial clusters are rare.

And for the diaspora — the largest and most reliable source of foreign exchange — there is no serious institutional framework to invest productively at home. No large-scale industrial parks, no export-linked investment vehicles, no protected manufacturing zones, no professional, transparent system to treat their capital as national development fuel.

So, their remittances enter the banking system — and largely finance consumption and imports. In effect, overseas Pakistanis are paying for a lifestyle at home that the domestic economy cannot sustain on its own.

A nation cannot outsource its economic survival to its emigrants forever.

The hidden cost to the nation

There is a deeper cost to this model that does not show up in financial statistics. A country that becomes comfortable living on remittances becomes comfortable losing its people.

The departure of doctors, engineers, nurses, technicians, and entrepreneurs is quietly absorbed into the balance of payments. But every plane that takes off full of young Pakistanis is also carrying away skills, energy, and potential that the country desperately needs.

No nation can build a future by exporting its youth and importing cars.

Honour the sacrifice — with reform

Overseas Pakistanis have shown extraordinary loyalty. They have kept families afloat, supported the economy, and carried the country through crisis after crisis.

They deserve more than praise. They deserve a system that turns their sacrifice into lasting national wealth.

That means:

Affordable energy for industry

Fair and predictable taxation

Serious export policy

A credible institutional framework that allows the diaspora to invest in factories, technology, and jobs — not just in real estate and consumption

Pakistan does not lack hardworking people. It has them all over the world. What it lacks is a System that makes their return — and their investment — worth coming home for.