Aging Parents and Emigrating Youth: When Will It Stop?

In view of Pakistan’s gradually deteriorating conditions, most parents employ all their efforts, endeavors, and accumulated savings, investing their entire emotional and financial capital to pave the way for their children’s bright future and send them abroad.

Even while knowing that their own old age will pass by sacrificing their comforts and enduring loneliness, emotional deprivation, and, in many respects, financial backwardness, they continue striving for their children’s better future. However, when such parents themselves reach the final phase of life after retirement, they face circumstances that are, in themselves, no less than a sacrifice—namely, loneliness and difficulties in management and day-to-day affairs. At the same time, due to losing the savings, capital, and accumulated wealth that could have been preserved in their own lives as a result of sending their children abroad, they are compelled to restrict their necessities as well.

There is also an emotional aspect to this: parents sacrifice their comforts, the security of their future in old age, and their health and well-being so that their children may go on to live a good life. They do so even while knowing that, in the final phase of life, they will have to spend their last days under mental stress, a sense of loneliness, and concern for the welfare of their children living abroad.

In many respects, had they not sent their children abroad, the prospects of having comforts would have brightened for them, and had they kept their financial circumstances stable for future ease and comfort, there would have been no need to limit their necessities. Certainly, apart from this, in the last phase of life, due to limited social activities, their social integration also continues to become increasingly restricted.

This, then, is the condition of those middle-class individuals who are often self-made. But apart from them, laborers, farmers, and those people in society who are compelled to live below the poverty line also facilitate sending their children abroad by selling their livestock and belongings, so that they may even enter a developed country through illegal means and improve their future, and so that they may send some money from abroad on a monthly basis to support their parents in old age. However, such dreams often do not come true.

There are two reasons for this. First, when the children of such parents go abroad illegally, many of them are lost at sea. Those who survive and reach a European country are themselves forced to face extreme hardship and deprivation in foreign lands. Even those who succeed in obtaining better conditions have to struggle so much that they become cut off from the remaining family residing in their homeland, and in their hearts there remains no feeling for their aged parents—parents who had sacrificed even their accumulated savings for them in the past and had even sold their possessions—to become a support in their old age.

When national conditions, economic problems, national security issues, and other factors are considered, in such circumstances the departure of laborers as well as highly educated and skilled individuals from the country, instead of serving the nation—what is termed brain drain—also deprives the country of benefiting from its young workforce and experts, and this is harmful to the country.

Despite the government’s claims of economic growth, according to the State Bank, foreign investment declined by 82 percent during the first four months of the current fiscal year. The Labour Force Survey of the Ministry of Planning and Development stated that the unemployment rate in the country is 7.1 percent, which is the highest rate in two decades. In Pakistan, the unemployment rate has increased by 31 percent, as a result of which an additional 1.4 million people have become unemployed. And people aged 65 years or above are also being forced to earn a living to keep the wheel of life moving, either because their children are unemployed or their income is so low and limited that the children are not able to bear the burden of supporting their parents.

The irony is that when I meet students and the youth of the nation in universities, the same impression is received—that almost everyone is ready to go abroad. This trend appears likely to continue until the youth of my country see a ray of hope, and such a ray of hope will appear only when Pakistan’s conditions improve economically and young people can see the betterment of their education and future within their own homeland.

In such circumstances, it is essential for the government to wisely improve its educational reforms along with creating economic opportunities. In such a situation, Pakistan’s leaders should, by making better use of all existing resources, pave the way for skills development and quality education, and completely separate political involvement from educational institutions.

It has been observed that in every university in the country, through one means or another, political influence results not only in political appointments across university institutions but also, due to political interference, in a gradual decline in the standard of education. When the youth of the nation complete their education and graduate, their degrees hold no more value than pieces of paper, because such degrees provide very limited benefits in the job market.

In one sense, if viewed comprehensively, the country’s leaders and its people will have to do what China or India did—create such conditions within their own countries and bring about such improvement that their people who had gone abroad began returning to their homelands, because they started receiving opportunities in their own countries comparable to, or similar to, those abroad.

Through such a situation, both we and our parents—who made such sacrifices to send their children abroad—as well as their children’s future, can move forward in a better direction.