Athens, May 2 Pakistan's visa fraud, begging rackets, smuggling cases, and terror-linked prosecutions abroad expose deep-rooted domestic failures, from weak document control and exploitation of poverty to entrenched criminal networks and militant ecosystems at home, a report has detailed.
“Pakistan often presents its diaspora as a pillar of national strength: a source of remittances, manpower, and international prestige. Yet a more uncomfortable reality keeps surfacing. Repeated cases involving Pakistani nationals overseas continue to expose the same institutional failures that afflict Pakistan at home: visa misuse, organised begging networks, human smuggling, narcotics trafficking, radicalisation, and a state far more effective at celebrating remittance inflows than at enforcing discipline, regulating migration, or protecting its own citizens," a report in Athens-based 'Geopolitico' detailed.
According to the report, Pakistan's global image is increasingly being shaped by the spillover of domestic disorder.
It highlighted that in December 2025, Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency reportedly informed a parliamentary committee that 56,000 people linked to “organised begging” were deported from Saudi Arabia that year.
Wider crackdowns also led to more than 66,000 passengers offloaded amid concerns over illegal migration and visa abuse involving work, tourist, and Umrah visas.
In March 2026, Pakistani authorities reportedly again warned that Umrah visas were being misused as “channels for unlawful onward travel to Europe".
“When pilgrimage routes are repeatedly converted into pathways for trafficking and illegal migration, the issue moves beyond consular embarrassment. It becomes evidence of a state that has lost effective control over the mechanisms through which its citizens leave the country,” the report noted.
“The same dysfunction appears in organised begging networks abroad. Pakistani officials themselves have acknowledged that deportations from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other countries are partly connected to begging rackets and visa misuse. This matters because it challenges the comfortable narrative that Pakistan’s labour-export system is solely a story of hard-working migrants mistreated by foreign legal systems,” it mentioned.
Asserting that militancy remains Pakistan’s most damaging export, the report cited the Global Terrorism Index 2026, which identified the country as the most affected by terrorism in 2025, recording 1,045 incidents, 1,139 deaths, and 1,595 injuries.
The report further stated that narcotics trafficking abroad forms part of the broader trend noting that six Pakistani nationals were arrested in Saudi Arabia on December 24, 2025, for allegedly receiving 71 kilograms of methamphetamine in Riyadh. It added that earlier that month, two Pakistani nationals were executed in Saudi Arabia’s Mecca following conviction for attempting to smuggle heroin and other drugs into the Kingdom.
Emphasising the underlying pattern, the report said, “Pakistan’s problem is not simply that some of its citizens commit crimes overseas. Every country faces that reality. Pakistan’s deeper problem is that too many of these cases trace back to failures it has refused to fix within its own borders."
Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor