M. Awais
Stand in the departure hall at Allama Iqbal International Airport at three in the morning, and you will watch the country’s most valuable export move through it. Young men and women clutching document folders, mothers holding on a moment too long at the barrier, a father repeating instructions nobody is listening to anymore.
The Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment recorded 762,499 Pakistanis leaving for work in 2025, up from 727,381 the year before. In the first six months of 2026, another 317,436 went. By July, the figure had reached 356,674.
That is not a trend. That is an evacuation, conducted politely, one boarding pass at a time.
Most of those leaving are labourers and semi-skilled workers, and their remittances have kept this economy breathing for fifty years. But 18,352 highly qualified professionals also left legally in 2025. Thousands of doctors and nurses. Thousands of engineers. Thousands of accountants. Software developers by the plane load.
Ask any of them why, and you will not hear a story about betrayal. You will hear arithmetic.
We have built an education system that produces qualifications and an economy that produces almost no vacancies. Every year the universities hand out degrees to hundreds of thousands of young people, and every year the market receives them with a shrug.
The public sector runs on hiring freezes and contract appointments. Entry-level advertisements demand three years of experience for work that is, by definition, the start of a career. Young doctors wait years for a house job, then longer for a permanent post. Engineering graduates accept salaries a delivery rider can match. Internships are offered unpaid, as though rent were optional.
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argued in Why Nations Fail that extractive institutions “do not create the incentives needed for people to save, invest, and innovate.” Our version of that failure is quieter. We do not stop our young people from achieving. We simply give them nowhere to do it.
We are not losing our best to other countries. We are handing them over, with a degree in one hand and nothing to put it to work on in the other.
The destinations tell their own story. Saudi Arabia absorbed 530,256 workers in 2025 and 183,951 more in early 2026. Qatar took 68,376, the Emirates 52,664. Against those numbers, the Western flows look negligible: 4,355 to the United Kingdom, 1,005 to the United States, 984 to Germany.
Those small numbers are the expensive ones. That is where the consultants, researchers, specialists and founders go, and they rarely come back.
Then comes the paradox nobody in Islamabad wants to examine honestly. This exodus produced record remittances of 38.5 billion dollars in FY25, propping up reserves and buying the state room to breathe.
The Pakistan Institute of Development Economics has been blunt about what that dependence costs. We now rank sixth in the world for human capital migration. Stripped of the terminology, it means this: we are paying our national bills by selling the very people who would have built the companies, hospitals and laboratories that could have paid them instead.
Amartya Sen described development in Development as Freedom as “a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy.” Leaving is a freedom, and no Pakistani should be shamed for exercising it. The failure is that for a talented twenty-six-year-old in Faisalabad, it has become the only real freedom on offer.
Turning drain into gain is not beyond us, and it does not begin with sentiment. Tie public university funding to graduate employment outcomes rather than enrolment numbers, so that institutions are answerable for what happens after convocation. Create paid apprenticeships co-funded by the state and industry, and remove the experience requirement from entry-level public posts. Offer returning professionals what they actually need: fast-track faculty and hospital appointments, research grants that arrive on time, and a few tax-free years to re-establish themselves. Build a diaspora fellowship that brings specialists home for two- and three-year terms rather than demanding a permanent decision. Issue diaspora bonds with a single-window investment desk, so that some of those 38.5 billion dollars buy ownership in this country instead of only groceries. And treat our freelancers and IT exporters as the industry they already are, with banking and payment channels that let them earn in dollars while living and hiring here.
None of that requires a miracle. It requires deciding that our own young people are worth designing a country around.
And they are worth it. This is not a nation poor in talent. Our doctors run wards in Riyadh and Manchester. Our engineers are trusted with infrastructure carrying millions. Our coders sit inside firms that shape how the world works. Every one of them was taught here, by teachers paid too little, in classrooms that deserved better.
That capacity did not come from somewhere else. It came from this soil, and it can be put back into it. This is our Pakistan. Nobody is coming from abroad to repair it for us, and nobody needs to. The same generation buying one-way tickets today would build here in a heartbeat if we gave them a reason to stay.
This is our land. It is still ours to make worth staying for.
Long Live Pakistan!
The writer is an engineer. He can be reached at: [email protected]
