Pakistan should treat its emigrants as human capital exports

A contentious question, asked rationally

Muzamil returns to Dil Ki Baat after a break spent travelling and launching a new podcast season. He admits the title is clickbait, and says so openly. The content, he promises, is a rational discussion. He is also part of the story now, since he is an overseas Pakistani himself.

The trigger is a report circulating on social media. According to it, 1.6 million Pakistanis left the country last year, many of them educated and capable. Some blame government policy. Others warn of brain drain. The debate over overseas Pakistanis is old. Should they vote? Should their opinions count? Muzamil wants to step past the emotion and look at it through religious, nationalist and economic lenses.

He has felt the guilt-tripping personally. When he announced he was leaving Pakistan, social media erupted. “I was not expecting that at all,” he says. He is a private citizen, earns honestly and files his taxes. People accused him of selling Pakistan and then leaving it. He found the logic confusing. “Can Pakistan only be sold from inside Pakistan?” he asks. He also admits he once held similar views about overseas Pakistanis himself, even though much of his family lived abroad.

Migration happens inside every country

His first point is that migration is not only about crossing borders. Thirty to fifty years ago, much of Pakistan lived in villages. Over the last 10 to 15 years, many people moved to cities for education and work. Growing up in Islamabad, he noticed the city emptied at Eid, because most of its residents had come from somewhere else. They were economic migrants.

Nobody tells a villager who moved to the city that he has lost the right to speak about his village. When he returns with ideas on sewage, management or cleanliness, he is celebrated. A Pathan from Swabi working in Lahore does not stop being a Pathan. Muzamil asks why the same logic does not apply to people who move abroad.

The religious and nationalist cases

He then turns to religion. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) made the hijrat to Madina, and Islamic history honours it. He did not let go of his roots in Makkah. He later returned to Makkah, yet chose Madina as his home base. Muzamil also notes that the faith’s original framework has no national boundaries.

Nation states, he argues, are a short chapter. In thousands of years of recorded history, only about the last 100 have restricted people’s movement this tightly. He shares something he was told recently: until the 1950s and 1960s, people from the subcontinent who went for Hajj and stayed in a Saudi city are Saudi today. “So hijrat was not a problem,” he says. It became one when nationalism arrived.

The nationalist case, he says, points the same way. The two figures Pakistanis place highest, Allama Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, both left the subcontinent for education and work. Iqbal wrote much of his thinking about the subcontinent’s Muslims while living in Europe. Jinnah, Muzamil notes, was culturally anglicised and preferred English to Urdu. Yet he came back and founded a country. If Jinnah could go abroad and still serve his homeland, Muzamil argues, no one can tell a Pakistani that leaving takes away their right to an opinion.

Why people leave

Muzamil estimates that 95 to 97% of modern migration is economic. People go where the same effort earns a better return. “You cannot stop it,” he says. If legal routes close, illegal ones open. As long as regions differ in wealth, people will move. The remaining 2 to 3% are asylum seekers and people who face danger or are social outcasts at home. Some also move to find a place whose values match their own, which he also sees as legitimate.

He adds that if a place offered safety but no economic gain, most Pakistanis would stay home, close to family, language and culture. Economics is what moves people.

What overseas Pakistanis bring back

The economic core of the episode is about dollars. Pakistan does not earn enough of them, he argues, because it lacks global connectivity and does not export enough. Since cars, phones and laptops are bought with dollars, a limited supply of dollars means limited goods and high prices.

His estimate of who brings those dollars in is striking. About 15 million Pakistanis live abroad. They send around 30 billion dollars a year through legal channels. Exports bring in about the same, but much of that goes back out on imported raw material, leaving perhaps 15 to 20 billion dollars net. On top of that, he puts informal hawala and hundi flows at an estimated 20 billion dollars. So, by his estimate, about 50 billion dollars a year comes from overseas Pakistanis.

He accepts the common objection that these workers are supporting their families, not doing the country a favour. Exporters are not doing anyone a favour either, he replies. Both are doing something productive for Pakistan, and policy makers should value that. He also notes how much overseas Pakistanis give to charities such as TCF, Shaukat Khanum and the Edhi Foundation.

Human capital export

Here Muzamil offers his own framework. Pakistan is a developing country with a large population, so it will always have more people than productive jobs. Those extra people can stay and run a chips stand, or they can work abroad. “Why do you want to keep them locked in your well?” he asks. He calls the alternative human capital export. “This is not remittance,” he says of the 30 billion dollars. “This is human capital export.”

He points to the Philippines, which trains people from high school for work abroad, as nannies, in hotels and in domestic service, with agencies, pathways and embassy protection built around them. Tens of billions of dollars return each year because the country treats this as an industry.

India is his second example. After its 1991 crisis, large numbers of Indians left for jobs abroad and slowly rose in their industries. Where Pakistan demonises its diaspora, he says, India glamorises its NRIs in its films and kept the connection. Today India has the world’s largest diaspora, which he says sends about 120 billion dollars a year. Yet about a million Indians still leave every year, and Chinese migrants keep leaving too, despite decades of growth. “People will keep leaving,” he says. What matters is how a country turns that to its advantage.

He sees two kinds of return. Pakistanis in the Middle East and East Asia usually cannot get citizenship, so most of their savings eventually come home. Those who settle in Europe, North America and Australia become Pakistan’s soft power, carrying its culture and values and connecting it to the world in business and politics. Either way, many return with better ethics, laws and business practices they have seen abroad. That is knowledge transfer.

Demographics make this more urgent. In Europe, Japan and China, average ages are in the mid-40s or higher, and economists are warning of stagnation. Pakistan’s average age is about 23, while Europe’s is about 46. Muzamil asks why Pakistan cannot train nurses for Europe’s ageing population, or factory workers for Japan and Korea.

Brain drain is a training problem

Then he takes on brain drain directly. Twenty-five years ago, he says, he would have agreed with it completely. Today he is confused by it. When a labourer leaves for Dubai, his physical work is lost to Pakistan. When a manager, IT worker or doctor leaves, their mind is still reachable over the internet. “Given the right infrastructure, given the right connectivity, every Pakistani can train 100 other Pakistanis,” he says. If that is not happening, the problem is the training and development structure.

The real loss, in his view, is experience: people with 5 to 10 years in industry who know how to manage people, resources and products. He also criticises the narrative in Pakistan that anyone who teaches online courses is selling snake oil. Some courses may be poor, he grants, but the country needs a serious training layer.

His numbers explain why. About 30 lakh young people turn 18 in Pakistan each year, and he expects that to reach 50 lakh in ten years. Higher education has about 3 to 3.5 lakh seats, so about 26 lakh people a year cannot get a place. This is happening in the age of AI, when jobs are becoming more technical. Universities cannot fill the gap alone. If just 1% of overseas Pakistanis, about 1.5 lakh people, each trained 50 others, he argues, the gap would shrink fast. Pakistani workers are already cheaper on the global market, so trained ones can find jobs.

Go, stay connected, and bring others

Muzamil’s conclusion is plain. There is nothing wrong with being an overseas Pakistani, and no one should be made to feel guilty for it. If someone stays in Pakistan only out of a sense of patriotic duty, and sees better opportunities abroad, “you should 100% go.” But go as an ambassador and stay connected.

Once settled, he asks overseas Pakistanis to think beyond investing in a real estate project back home. Could they bring 10 or 20 more Pakistanis into similar jobs, or train them from abroad? “One node changes the fate of a whole family,” he says. He does not ask them to do it for free. Charge for it, he says, but teach with real care, to build people up.

He describes the 15 million strong diaspora as one of the largest and richest in the world, and a great power if it is connected. His own mission, he says, is to teach and upskill as many Pakistanis as he can, help them reach jobs abroad or dollar-paying jobs from home, and bring those dollars back to Pakistan.