Planned Brain Export or Unplanned Brain Drain: Evaluating Pakistan's Migration Governance Architecture against BEOE Outflow Data (2000–2025)

Abstract

Pakistan does not have an official migration policy. Since 1971, the Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment (BEOE), under the Emigration Ordinance of 1979, has helped registered workers depart by more than 14 million. Farooq and Ahmad (2017) simply stated that Pakistan needs to transform brain drain into brain export, a process that requires state strength which Pakistan is lacking. Since the independence of Pakistan, the successive governments have considered emigration as a productive economic activity of remittances without taking any steps to tackle with its composition and institutional framework to manage the emigration process, Kaukab (2005) observed. The paper examines if there has been any structural change in Pakistan's migration governance from 2000 to 2025. It relies on BEOE annual outflow statistics for 2000-2025, the PIDE policy analyses, BEOE annual reports, MRC/ICMPD Q3 2025 data, migration analysis by Gallup Pakistan (2025) and literature on migration governance and political economy. The results reveal that Pakistan's migration governance structure is essentially unchanged from that in 1979. The draft migration policy from 2020 is not approved. Total BEOE outflows were 862,625 in 2023 and BEOE "inflows" indicate 525,551 outflows in 2025 alone. The skill structure of outflows has remained structurally unchanged: more than half of total outflows are still unskilled and semi-skilled workers. More than 90% of all outflows still end up in the GCC destinations. The paper concludes that Pakistan continues to be a country of unplanned brain drain and that the political economy of its migration governance remittance dependence, legislative sluggishness, low capacity of state and lack of an architecture of engagement of the diaspora systematically hinders the shift from unplanned to planned brain export.

Keywords: planned brain export; brain drain; BEOE; migration governance; Pakistan; Emigration Ordinance 1979; remittance dependence; state capacity; political economy; MRC; ICMPD