While I find myself in agreement with two tragedies and two Pakistans in the first half of the editorial, it’s the second half where he invites the reader to accept the “critical role played by social mores and mindsets” in driving “life-risking migrations” that I find rather naïve. Hoodbhoy cites his recent lecture tour to the US alongside Ali Nobil Ahmad’s psychodynamic study of migration patterns in Masculinity, Sexuality, and Illegal Immigration: Human Smuggling from Pakistan to Europe to suggest that masculinity and sexuality play a vital role in what Hoodbhoy has called “life-risking migrations.”
While I have long appreciated Hoodbhoy’s voice in Pakistan, his view of migration is overshadowed by his cynical view of religion and somewhat by his disillusionment with the Pakistani education system. As disgruntled as I myself am with both the Pakistani religiosity and education system, I feel compelled to offer some counter points of thought.
For the poor Pakistan out of the two Pakistans, Hoodbhoy avers that young men “strive to escape a conservative society” because “a faraway world beckons wherein pleasures of the flesh are tauntingly visible through advertising and general openness.” I wish this was as widely true as the editorial portrays it to be for that’d point to a desire for a more open, progressive Pakistan – but unfortunately, this is not the case. Firstly, the visibility of these pleasures in ads, the reality of pleasures on ground, and the accessibility of these pleasures are different issues.
Secondly, any young migrants from poor Pakistan, in my observation, find the “tauntingly visible” “pleasures of the flesh” rather unsettling. Many highly educated, first-time Pakistani visitors to the US are usually disappointed by the lack of visibility of “flesh” and the absence of public intimacy. They are also disappointed by the lacklustre American Valentine’s Day contrary to the more public celebratory displays of roses and condemnatory debates on Valentine’s Day in Pakistan. Encountering the “openness” in the US also throws into crisis people’s sense of their own identity. Generally, for Pakistani men – who remain relatively socially privileged in Pakistan, despite their socioeconomic deprivilege – the major lure in the US is economic opportunity.
Hoodbhoy mentions that he often meets young Pakistanis who want to exit Pakistan, which is unsurprising since almost every Pakistani – despite their loudly and often irritatingly proclaimed nationalism – wants to leave. But Hoodbhoy then asserts that their “knowledge deficit” and “conservative values” hinder their chances of “doing well” outside Pakistan, presumably in the West.
While the Pakistani education system is deplorable, many undereducated or uneducated Pakistanis, who still remain culturally conservative, have also managed to accumulate wealth in the US. Should we discount those instances when talking about Pakistani immigrants and their chances of success?
Hoodbhoy cites that during his “lecture tour,” he encountered “the ultra-wealthy” “genre of Pakistani immigrants,” all of whom except one had attended “private ‘O’-‘A’-level schools and then sought education overseas.” These students were “well settled” and “liberal-minded.” He also mentions medical doctors “trained at Pakistan’s elite medical universities” and Silicon Valley tech-bros, who display a bold combination of “engineering skills with business acumen.”
While I couldn’t find the details of his US tour, the fact that he only encountered ‘O’-‘A’-level ultra-wealthy students – when now, more than ever before, middle or lower-middle-class students have access to resources and guidance to study in American universities – leads me to assume that most of his lectures were also at “ultra-wealthy” American universities. So, he has only experienced the rich Pakistan both inside and outside Pakistan. He did not meet the kind of people who themselves or whose family members would choose to board a refugee trawler to illegally move out of Pakistan as their last resort in a godforsaken country where they don’t even receive human treatment, let alone financial opportunities. He also asserts that America has no mini-Bradfords or mini-Birminghams.
Along with the agoraphobic undertones of this statement, it also leads me to assume that he did not meet the throngs of asylees and illegal immigrants who came to the US through donkey and live in communities like the Little Pakistan in Brooklyn amidst other Pakistani immigrants.
Hoodbhoy asserts that “deep-seated psychological forces” are as important as the “economic forces.” If we are to consider the “deep-seated psychological forces” at play in motivating young people to leave their homes and home country, then the biggest psychological force is the humiliation and indignity that poor Pakistanis generally – but Pakistani young people, especially – face in Pakistan.
What many appreciate about the US is the sense of human dignity that one feels (which, though steeped in historical and structural inequities, is more than what any not-filthy-rich Pakistani would ever feel at home). This is the sentiment that resonates in many stories of Pakistani migrants. This is what we witness when young people, pulled by the hope of a better future, are tried in Pakistani military courts while the affluent ones are not only forgiven but are also granted new political opportunities. This is what we witness when the Greek protestors take to the streets to demand answers from their authorities upon the death of 298 Pakistanis but the majority of Pakistanis remain entranced by the epic tragedy that is the death of Pakistani billionaires. This general apathy towards the poor and respect for the rich is on display when Pakistanis protest for the handsome and the rich but not for the poor, the ugly, or the wretched of their own earth.
While teaching at rural-serving government universities in Pakistan, my most dispiriting experience was seeing hundreds of young faces in the classrooms and knowing that it is already too late for them. A professor at a government university in Pakistan who also offers CSS and other preparatory workshops recently shared with me that not a single privately schooled, O and A level student has ever come to his preparatory classes – this encapsulates the wide and widening class gulf in Pakistan.
Young people from villages are left with no farming lands due to the expansion of machine assembling factories or due to the real estate mafia in the country on the brink of default. When you say that people pay $7,500 to human traffickers, we should also consider that their families bet all of their family’s members’ assets – if not borrowed – on one person, who is then responsible for taking care of siblings’ education and marriages alongside parents’ old age. These young people desperately seek a recourse to sustain their families. Many come from villages to seek a better future via education in a system where education means nothing if detached from socioeconomic and anglophonic linguistic privileges.
Hoodbhoy, in a Weberian vein, correlates wealth production with cultural values and worldview to rather rhetorically ask why there are more Indians in Silicon Valley than Pakistanis. In this last instance, he repeats the tired Pakistani trope of India-Pakistani rivalry which needs to be retired now.
However, in the end, I invite the reader to reflect on the thesis of assimilation, boldness, passion, and entrepreneurial spirit that many, including Hoodbhoy in his focus engineering skills with business acumen, have reasserted to either argue for empathy upon the deaths of the billionaires or to admonish the poor for their risky choice of resorting to illegal donkey migration.
I digress from Hoodbhoy to pose some questions about the general narratives around these two tragedies to reconsider two perceptions of two Pakistans.
When entrepreneurs use expired materials and bypass legal requirements to invent toys for the rich that then kill the rich, then the billionaires are not responsible and should not be condemned for making life-threatening choices? But when poor human beings cross borders via donkey to seek a better future for their generations, they should be admonished for their illegal choices that pose a risk to their lives?
Are people’s bold decisions about their future only entrepreneurial and admirable if they grow up with enough money to afford a good education, engineering skills, and money management aka business acumen?