On one occasion, as I walked into an informal housing area of inner Karachi with closely-packed homes and bustling with hawkers to conduct an interview, my ‘guide’ Mukhtar** told me, “Nearly everyone here is Bengali. Some people have moved recently for economic reasons, to get jobs, and others have been here since the 1970s.” We paused for a while before going into the house of Mukhtar’s family’s friends, who have been living in Karachi since 1971. In the house I sat down to interview Shahnaz, a woman in her 30s, and her younger sisters. As I asked Shahnaz about life in the city and getting access to everyday goods – water, education, employment – Shahnaz told me: “At least Afghans have some form of identity cards, we do not even have any document to say who we are – we are nobody.”

In another interview in the same area, 32-year-old Noorulain repeated this sentiment as she told me her story:

Our family was living across the borders when the [1971] war happened, my father was here [in Karachi] and then afterwards my mother joined him, and slowly we moved across [from Dhaka] as well – we had to move. I was born here, I went to school here. My children go to school here.  But the government does not recognise us. Nor does any organisation. We are nobody.

My curiosity about this topic grew through the conversations I had. Bangladeshis in Pakistan, as a ‘non-existent’ group, are vulnerable to excesses of state and non-state actors because there is no one who speaks up for them. As literature on the informal political economy in urban Pakistan increasingly shows, these people are reliant on the ever-growing presence of middlemen, fixers, and the like. According to one GOP official I interviewed:

The Bengalis, as the most insecure population, are often robbed of their possessions by the police. The National Aliens Registration Authority [a government organisation established to register illegal migrants] is a half-working scheme and has only been launched in Karachi. They [the Bangladeshis] have no identity cards and documents and the state requires greater support to address this issue.

The neglect that Bangladeshis face is, in part, related to unresolved issues from the 1971 War, in which hundreds of thousands of Pakistani Biharis were left stranded in Bangladesh by the GOP, remaining there today. “If the Pakistani government recognises the Bangladeshis in Pakistan, the state will have to accept responsibility for the Biharis,” a human rights lawyer in Karachi told me. In other cases the line between political and economic migrant blurs as many Bangladeshis have migrated in search of jobs and income rather than political persecution. 

Geopolitics matters
As I continued my work on Afghans, discovering the intense ways in which they are enumerated and managed in Pakistan, another more glaring explanation for the differences in international and Pakistani attention towards Bangladeshis versus Afghans was revealed. Geopolitics, it appears, matters greatly. Massive attention has been paid to Afghans in Pakistan; they have been constructed as refugees in need of help in order to support the ‘hearts and minds’ public relations campaigns of the US and its allies, Saudi Arabia, and the GOP, to legitimise conflicts against the Soviet Union or Taliban. Or more recently, in the context of the GWOT, Afghans have been constructed as dangerous, threats that need to be monitored, enumerated, and quantified, by the US and its allies, in order to ensure a successful counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. Bangladeshis, on the other hand, are less ‘useful’ in geopolitical terms. Firstly, the conflict between Bangladesh and Pakistan was over relatively quickly in the 1970s. Secondly, after 1971 Bangladesh was not an immediate territorial border concern for the (West) Pakistani state dominated by the Punjab, as was the case with Afghanistan. And thirdly, it was not an internationalised conflict involving global superpowers as the wars in Afghanistan have been.

International institutions such as the UNHCR are influenced by hegemonic superpowers via funding. The separation between humanitarianism, counterinsurgency strategies, and wider geopolitical pressures is thin. The international migration regime via seemingly neutral organisations such as the UNHCR and, more recently, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), are complicit with, or at least vulnerable to, the wider political goals of global superpowers. Again, they are not necessarily concerned with the ‘humanitarianism’ to which they lay claim. In this scenario then, Bangladeshis in Pakistan are – alongside others – quite simply geopolitically irrelevant.

Critically, however, this does not mean that Afghans are currently having a ‘great time’ in Pakistan. After the Afghan state was blamed for sheltering the perpetrators of the September 2001 attacks, and Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf promptly joined the US-led GWOT, the Pakistani military-political leadership was keen on making clear the distinction between the ‘Bad Muslim’ Afghan state and the ‘Good Muslim’ Pakistani state, which included their people. This has meant that whilst Afghans in Pakistan have been enumerated and given identity cards, this has been done to encourage Afghan repatriation back to Afghanistan, both voluntarily and coercively since the 2000s. It has also meant that whilst during the 1980s all Afghans were classified as ‘refugees’, the Afghan legal status has now moved to ‘Afghan citizens in Pakistan’ (via biometric identity cards) with ‘temporary residency’, or simply ‘illegal migrants’ (undocumented workers). Indeed throughout my work, Afghans were all too aware that the increased insecurity they were experiencing in Pakistan was the result of changing foreign policy goals of the GOP and the USA and its allies.

Recognising multi-national spaces
In the longer term, the ability of Pakistan to effectively deal with the multiple issues regarding migration into Pakistan is rooted in a number of factors, including colonial legacies of ‘boundary-making’, and the idea that migration is unusual. In addition, and in contrast to the ongoing hyperbole in the global North over migration numbers into Europe, North America, and Australia, it is the countries of the global South, including Pakistan, that are the largest recipients of refugees. Huge economic and political pressures are put on these states. Furthermore, Pakistan itself is undergoing numerous difficulties: political violence, internal displacement, and a weakened economy from neo-liberal economic reforms, meaning it lacks the capacity to provide for refugees, migrants, and, importantly, even its own citizens.

In the short term it is only if the international migration regime is encouraged to be engaged with persons who are geopolitically ‘insignificant’, as well as those who are ‘significant’, that the lived experiences of Bangladeshis, Afghans, and others in Pakistan can be different. However, the UNHCR and/or the IOM and the wider migration regime can only function effectively if they are given greater independence to do so. For real change, it is also necessary to step beyond simple ‘refugee’/‘illegal migrant’/‘citizen’ frameworks. Urban centres such as Karachi, Peshawar, Rawalpindi, Quetta and Lahore are multinational spaces. Millions of non-nationals – either undocumented workers or refugees – are an integral part of these cities. These people have limited scope to return to their native homelands or live lives across national borders, dividing their time between Kabul and Peshawar, for example.

Walking Peshawar or Karachi’s neighbourhoods, shops and roads, or using the cities’ transport routes, you cannot escape the diverse reality of these places. As I sat in the home of Hamza, an Afghan native of Peshawar, I was told: “It is we, Afghans, who built up the new roads that you see in Peshawar.” And in Karachi, Jahanara, a Bangladeshi domestic worker, told me: “It is we who clean the houses and are employed as domestic labourers in the richer houses. But we are invisible, first because we are poor and, second, because we are not Pakistani.”

Whilst Pakistan itself was founded on migration during Partition in 1947, and the immediate years thereafter, the refugees and migrants from Bangladesh after 1971 and Afghanistan after 1978, and others thereafter, are not welcome. This is in large part because the number of refugees moving into Southern countries, such as Pakistan, relative to movement into Northern countries is substantially larger. This reflects wide power asymmetries in the international system and creates significant demographic, political, and economic impacts on host states. Further, some commentators – academics, journalists, politicians – are wary that Afghans and Bangladeshis, if naturalised in the future, may contribute towards ethnic tensions during electoral ballots in cities like Karachi, with the Muttahida Qaumi Movement Party (MQM) associated with Muslim Indian migrants in Sindh coveting Bangladeshi votes, and the Awami National Party (ANP), associated with Pakistani Pashtuns, coveting Afghan votes.

Yet discussions and long-term strategies regarding the position of Afghans, Bangladeshis, and other migrants in Pakistan need to take place. The reality of millions of ‘non-nationals’ being an integral and long-term part of Pakistan is inescapable. A potential amnesty scheme towards undocumented migrants and refugees, or at the very least long-term work and/or residency permits, needs to be tabled. And forcefully. This would allow the Government of Pakistan to recognise what is already a reality in the country, and simultaneously offer some form of stability to people who contribute towards the state’s society and economy.

* In Pakistan people use the term Bengali to mean anyone from Bangladesh, even after 1971, as it also encompasses an ethnic group.

** All names of informants have been changed to protect their identity. 

~ Sanaa Alimia teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, and has previously taught at the University of Peshawar. Her work focuses on refugees, migration, citizenship, and urban politics in Pakistan.