Those who eventually made it to Italy and UK experienced a life quite opposite to their “great expectations”
The centrality of home in our lives is discernable in many a quotations: George Moore in ‘The Brook Kerith’ writes, “A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it;” Hare observes, “To Adam Paradise was home, To the good among his descendants home is paradise;” and J Howard Payne in “Home sweet home,” records, “Mid pleasure and palaces through we roam, Be it ever so humble, there is no place like home.” When home is so ‘sweet’ and ‘paradise’ like and a place where one eventually finds, what one’s is looking for then why do so many men leave their homes and migrate to other countries? Human migration is as old a phenomenon as man himself is and there are academic investigations to understand its rationale; however, there is hardly any credible work on illegal migration from Pakistan. Ali Nobil Ahmad, who is a professor at LUMS and a visiting professor at Brandeis University in Boston has explored the issue of human smuggling from Pakistan to Europe in his book entitled, “Masculinity, sexuality and illegal migration”. The focus of his investigations are the destinations of Italy and United Kingdom and the findings are based on the interviews of about ninety Pakistanis, who successfully smuggled themselves out to several towns and cities of these two countries. The research has produced a fascinating picture that explains the ‘Whys’, ‘Hows’ and ‘What Nows’ of this phenomenon.
Motivations
Incidentally, most of the men who illegally smuggled out to Europe were primarily from three cities of Pakistan: Gujrat, Gujranwala and Mandi Bahauddin. There are several factors that motivated the smuggled. One was the allure of a better life. This meant an imaginary future that would be glamorous and highly pleasurable. Till few decades back, ‘England Returned’ was considered ‘high class’ and ‘prestigious’ in Pakistan. ‘Chitti Chamri’ (white skin) has been akin to ‘richness’, ‘prettiness’, and ‘social respect’, particularly in the minds of the rural youth. The global consumer culture promoted by Western capitalism and disseminated through television and cinema throughout the globe induced the fantasies of the potential migrants about ‘good life’ in the West. Moreover, the ‘rush out of Pakistan’ in the 1990s was due to the ‘craze’ to start a new life in the West. Furthermore, some were attracted to the West either out of curiosity or the plain desire to migrate while for others it was an assertion of one’s youthful identity to be free from family or the patriarchal control as well as an expression of one’s financial autonomy and an opportunity of ‘ayyashi’ to indulge in hedonistic pleasures. Two findings of the author are noteworthy: one, the decision to migrate illegally was not based on any ‘rational calculation’, and two, it was not poverty that pushed these Pakistanis to undertake hazardous journeys because all of the interviewees were either employed or had the job options.
Travel experiences
Once the potential migrant decided to migrate, he had to search for a ‘reliable’ and ‘experienced agent’ to plan the journey and arrange for the payment to be made. There are several such ‘agents’; the more established ones are known to have done “PhD in human smuggling”, and hence, offer money back guarantees to the prospective clients. The amounts paid for smuggling per person out of Pakistan to Italy were between one to one hundred and fifty thousand rupees in mid – 1990s to three to five hundred thousand in late 1990s while for London the price was over seven hundred thousand in 2003. These figures lay bare the fact that it is not the poverty stricken but the men with the means who risked to smuggle out of Pakistan.
The author has unearthed several routes of smuggling but the most effective has been the overland route through Eastern Europe. The travel experiences are of mixed nature. The lucky ones reached the destinations without any big untoward incident while most complained of being treated as cargo and not as humans. Almost every interviewee the author met in Italy either personally knew or had heard of someone who had lost his life during the journey: An important question that begs explanation is that how is it possible for so many of the smuggled to penetrate illegally ‘Fortress Europe’? The author holds the European states as being partly responsible for the malaise because “its policing [is] tokenistic. Ostensibly impervious perimeter patrols and regulation of the state’s internal territory seem ineffective in practice, pathetic even.” If there are criminal minded operators of human smuggling in Pakistan, Europe has its own black sheep in police and other departments at borders that make such illegal adventures a “successful reality’’. Some of the accounts of the smuggled show that even the oppressive organs of the European state apparatus are quite humanistic in their treatment of the illegal migrants. One interviewee named Chima while narrating the time in a Moscow jail recalls, “… you eat and drink well. We would play cards, go out and play football.”
The grass on the other side is not always greener
Those who eventually made it to Italy and UK experienced a life quite opposite to their “great expectations”. Even those who belonged to the socially well- respected families in Pakistan found themselves at the lowest rung of the racial ladder and therefore had to do the most unpleasant and physically taxing jobs. In the process, the body of the migrant turned into a mere ‘tool for work’. An interviewee Asad admitted with a hint of sadness: “there’s no family here, no love- just work… no one has really time for anyone.” The struggle for survival leaves almost no time for sexual expression. The process of ‘dehumanising’ of ‘desire’ and ‘body’ of the migrant is beautifully explained by the author: “A profound sense of alienation threatens to erode the very existence of ‘desire’ in the Self, which is insidiously corroded through the dehumanising impact of work regimes and racialisation in the labour process that dematerialise immigrant workers’ bodies on a daily basis.”
As if all this is not enough, the migrants also experience a loss of spirituality. The mad race for money consumes most of the time leaving hardly any energy to observe even the basic tenets of religion, as is evident in the testimony of another interviewee, Faiz: “In eight months here, I have been to Friday prayers once. During Ramadan I didn’t manage to pray once. I keep thinking, ‘I left religion in pursuit of the world, but the world keeps escaping my grasp. And at the same time- bit by bit- religion is slowly disappearing from my life.’” For Farhad, “the cost of migration is nothing less than the loss of one’s soul” because for “a fist full of dollars”, the migrant loses his family, misses his culture and religious norms (irrespective of the fact whether one was observant or not).
One can feel a clear hint of disillusionment in the minds of the migrants. There is a growing sense of the loss of self, soul and spirituality so the same old Pakistan from which they had run away begins to emerge as a better place than London or Rome. In the words of Zia, who has been the second longest settled of the smuggled men interviewed by the author, “There’s no real future in Italy…” Another one Bilal opined, “…even if you save half your pay here, Pakistan is still better than this to live.” Yet another one Faizal states, “Most of my life I have spent abroad… but I have got nothing from it… I reckon the man who stays in Pakistan is better off.” What can one say except that though the grass always looks greener on the other side; in reality, it is not so.
