According to the recent statistics published by the Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment, over 860,000 Pakistanis left the country in the calendar year 2023 abroad for education and in search of jobs.
The number is the highest since 2015. In 2015, the number of citizens leaving the county stood at 946,571, which is still the highest.
Looking at the numbers, it shows that during the mentioned period, 385,892 people identified as laborers and 196,575 as drivers left the country. The group of emigrants also included 8,741 engineers, 7,390 accountants, 3,486 doctors, and 1,533 teachers.
If we Break it down by job types, the report indicates that out of those who left, 22,760 had high qualifications, and 45,687 were considered highly skilled. Another 314,932 were seen as skilled, 86,593 as semi-skilled, and the majority, 392,653, were categorized as unskilled.
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Breaking it down by where they went, 426,951 workers moved to Saudi Arabia, 229,894 chose the United Arab Emirates, 55,112 headed to Qatar, and 60,046 went to Oman. Other notable destinations include Malaysia (20,905), Bahrain (13,345), Greece (2,914), Romania (4,947), and Iraq (4,307).
These numbers are from people registered with the Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment. It doesn’t include those who directly left for jobs or studied abroad.
The vast number of people leaving the country is alarming and signals the despondency of the nation regarding the future of Pakistan. The local job market is facing stagnation and uncertainty, forcing people to look for better and more promising job opportunities abroad.
Over the past year, the brain drain issue in Pakistan has sped up, picking up momentum as the economic conditions worsen. In the first six months of the previous year, over 832,000 young Pakistanis, with 400,000 highly skilled individuals among them, moved to other countries, adding to the phenomenon known as ‘brain drain.’
This pattern has continued for the past few years, leading to a significant total of 2.75 million young individuals departing from Pakistan in the last five years.
