KHUIRATTA: Hameed Iqbal Bhatti had prospered over two decades working in Saudi Arabia, but after returning to Pakistan three years ago, he was getting desperate.

The economy had suffered in the pandemic and his restaurant business closed. With work avenues drying up and sky-high inflation blowing a hole in his budget, the 47-year-old cobbled together $7,600 for a trafficker to smuggle him into Europe, where he hoped to rebuild the life he once had, his brother Muhammad Sarwar Bhatti said.

“He told me that he would start afresh for his children’s future and the life he wanted for them,” the elder Bhatti said at the family home in Azad Kashmir.

A boat that left Libya carrying his younger sibling and hundreds of others sank off Greece last week, in one of the deadliest migrant disasters of recent years. He is missing and presumed dead, according to his brother, highlighting the perils faced by people who seek to enter Europe illegally.

FIA data shows 401 caught trying to cross border illegally in first four months of 2023

Pakistanis have been making these journeys in increasing numbers in recent months because of the country’s economic crisis, according to more than a dozen migrants and their relatives, experts and data reviewed by Reuters.

The cash-strapped country’s $350 billion economy is in meltdown, with inflation at a record 38pc. A rapidly depreciating currency and external deficit led the government to adopt drastic measures over the past year to avoid default.

But with that came a huge hit to growth and jobs. The industrial sector, Pakistan’s economic engine, provisionally contracted almost 3% in the current financial year — troubling for a nation of 230 million with more than 2 million new entrants to the labour force annually.

Official unemployment data have not been published in two years. Hafeez Pasha, an economist renowned for his work on Pakistan’s labour force, put the jobless rate at a record “11-12%, conservatively”.

Pakistan’s information ministry did not respond to questions about economic factors fuelling migration.

Pushed to the brink

The 102,000 detections of irregular migrants at the European Union’s external border between January and May was 12pc higher than the previous year and the most since 2016, according to Frontex, the bloc’s border and coast guard agency.

Crossings of the central Mediterranean via Libya, mainly to Italy and Greece, nearly doubled, accounting for about half of the total. Currently, Pakistanis are the No. 3 nationality registered in Italy coming from Libya, after Egyptians and Bangladeshis, a Frontex spokesperson told Reuters in an email.

Of the detections this year through May, 4,971 were from Pakistan, a record for the country on the central Mediterranean route in a single year, according to Frontex data that go back to 2009.

Even before last week’s sinking, numerous Pakistanis had perished in the Mediterranean this year.

Muhammad Nadeem, 38, was aboard a boat that sank off Libya in February, killing more than 70.

Nadeem, from the eastern city of Gujrat, had three children and also supported his younger sister and mother. He worked as a salesman at a furniture store, but his wages were modest and rising inflation had made their situation precarious, according to his mother, Kosar Bibi.

“We used to make ends meet, he could feed his family. But it had become impossible”, she told Reuters in their cramped three-room home where seven people live.

Bibi said her son paid someone he knew to arrange the trip to Italy, via Libya.

“He said, ‘Mother, our conditions will improve’. He said he would send me to do Hajj, he would get his sister married,” Bibi recalled.

Lure of foreign exchange

Most who make the journey are unskilled or labourers and it is difficult for them to obtain work visas, the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) said. But by living frugally in Europe they are able to save and send money home — a prospect made more attractive by the Pakistan rupee’s 35pc depreciation against the euro and dollar in the past 18 months.

“The way the situation is here right now, people think that foreign currency is going up in value, so whatever they earn it will multiply when they send it back,” said Sarwar Warraich, an FIA official based in Gujrat.

The FIA said it had clamped down on unauthorised crossings of Pakistan’s borders but noted that many who seek to enter Europe illegally depart with valid visas for Turkey or Libya before venturing onward.

Limited data the agency shared with Reuters showed that 401 people were caught crossing Pakistan’s borders illegally in the first four months of 2023, up about 50pc from a year earlier, while 15,371 deportees were repatriated in the same period, mostly from Turkey and Greece.

Pakistan is a top exporter of labour, and remittances have helped keep the country afloat. Nearly 830,000 people registered as overseas workers last year, the highest since 2016, official data show.

But legal migration opportunities are limited, and many migrants make arrangements through agents who often present irregular migration as a quicker, cheaper, or the only way to reach Europe, according to the Migrant Resource Centre, an EU-funded organisation that provides information and counselling to migrants.

Published in Dawn, June 24th, 2023