that it should not have begun. Yet it is unthinkable if not the
folly of the wildest optimism that this tragedy will in any way
deter those who may be planning to do the same, leave the country
by any means possible. They will sell all their belongings and beg,
borrow and steal to meet the costs involved in smuggling themselves
out. It is not cheap and those who trade in the smuggling of human
beings will tell you that apart from enriching themselves, they
have to enrich a wide variety of officials without whose help this
trade would not be possible. There is both a human and an inhuman
side to this business of illegal immigration.
I have met innumerable young men and women who have sought my help in getting them out of the country. Could I help to get them a
passport? Do I have any connections with any of the embassies so
that they could get visas? Any country, any visa for once they are
out, they will make their way. I tell them that I can neither get
them a passport nor a visa because what they are planning is wrong.
But having got off my high horse, I think to myself: do they have
any alternative? Unless one can offer them hope, why should one
prevent them for looking for it elsewhere? And one finds wishing
them the best of luck, for God knows that they will need luck. But
then who doesn't need luck?
We tend to be scornful of these illegal immigrants mainly because
we consider that they bring a bad name to our country. By that we
mean that they are a source of embarrassment to us when we
ourselves travel abroad. For we are all treated in those foreign
lands as if we are illegal immigrants. To present a Pakistani
passport at the immigration counter on arrival is to be made to
feel a criminal. And in our private conversation we curse the Pakis
who arrive with forged documents. The irony is that we think
nothing of taking their foreign exchange remittances and these
remittances once used to be a vital segment of our economy.
Those of us who worked for PIA in the sixties know how much we owed to what we would contemptuously describe as "bukra traffic." Only the more sensitive among us realised that we owed our salaries to these "bukras." They did not speak a word of English and indeed
were illiterate. But these were not men of straw. These were men of
steel.
They braved the social hazards, they braved the climate, they braved the ridicule that they were put to, they even braved the Pakistan Embassy who regarded them as an infernal nuisance. In 1962, there was a small-pox scare in the UK because it was believed that one of the Pakistani immigrants had brought it with him. The media in that country had quite a field day and it went to town. I was in England then and the Pakistan Embassy reaction to this scare was to distance itself from this nasty business.
But many of those Pakistanis have made good. Who knows, those who drowned off the coast of Sicily too might have made good, or not?