There are around 8.7 million overseas Pakistanis in various countries across the world. Most of them are in the Gulf countries. Around 2.6 million are in Saudi Arabia, 1.3 million in the UAE, 0.27 million in Oman, 0.113 million in Qatar and 0.108 million in Kuwait.

Around 1.47 million overseas Pakistanis are in the UK and one million in the US. The remaining number of overseas Pakistanis is present in more than 100 other countries across the world. Each year they send a large sum of money to their families in Pakistan, which results in an increase in foreign exchange remittances to Pakistan.

The State Bank of Pakistan has revealed that during the seven months (July 2017-January 2018) of the current fiscal year, the remittances have amounted to $11.38 billion. Pakistan was ranked in the fifth position among the World Bank’s ‘Top 5 Remittances Receiving Countries for 2016’ as it received $19.8 billion during the year.

Migrant workers are an integral part of Pakistan’s economy and the labour market. Remittances from the overseas workforce are not only one of the major sources of income for families of these workers, but for the country as well. And yet, the exploitation of Pakistani low-wage migrant workers in other countries remains an alarming endemic, a source of national shame.

Today is the United Nations International Migrants Day, commemorated every year on December 18 to call for migration that is “safe, regular and dignified for all”. Migration is a great issue for our globalized world, and a force for dignity because it allows people to choose to save themselves, letting them choose participation over isolation. The regulation of labour migration in Pakistan, however, remains weak, leaving thousands of mostly low-wage workers vulnerable to human trafficking, forced labour, ill treatment in detention overseas and even death.

Away from home, unemployed and terrified – this is how Pakistani migrant workers, around the world, faced the terrifying economic onslaught of the coronavirus outbreak earlier this year.

Heartbreaking videos of men and women appealing to the government for help flooded our social media timelines. Strapped and stranded, they were on the cusp of being evicted from their shelters for not paying rent but could still not find a way to come back home to their families.

How can you defend someone who is lying on a hospital bed waiting for his mother to feed him, wipe his mouth and then keep searching for a son she lost to a flawed justice system years ago? Or someone who hasn’t been able to speak for over a decade or someone who has lost all rational connections with his surroundings and now lives in a world of his own?

All these people have been on death row, despite having decades of documented history of mental illness – all of them waiting for the apex court to review its judgment that failed to recognise schizophrenia as a ‘permanent mental disorder’.