COVID-19: Over 53,600 Pakistanis emigrated to UAE for jobs in 2020

The highest number of Pakistanis looking for jobs abroad went to Saudi Arabia totalling 136,339, followed by the UAE (53,676) and Oman (10,336 to Oman).

The survey found that more than 11.4 million Pakistanis have gone abroad for employment across more than 50 countries, with a large chunk of them living and working in the Gulf countries.

Currently, Saudi Arabia and the UAE host the highest number of people from the South Asian country’s diaspora worldwide. There are approximately 1.6 million Pakistanis living and working in the UAE, making them the second highest number of foreign workers after Indian nationals.

The Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis and Human Resource Development (MOPHRD) said it exported more manpower than India and Bangladesh in 2020.

The number of Pakistanis who went abroad for jobs totalled 224,705 in 2020 — as compared to 217,699 from Bangladesh and 94,145 from India last year.

“For a country direly in need of foreign remittances, we created 1.2 million new jobs across the world since coming into government. Even with global slowdown during Covid-19, we kept Pakistan in leading spot. This alone accounts for 12 per cent of Prime Minister Imran Khan’s promised jobs,” said Syed Zulfikar Bukhari, former special assistant to the prime minister on overseas Pakistanis and human resource development.

However, overall a declining trend was observed in terms of emigrants registered in 2020.

Remittances sent by overseas Pakistanis stayed above the $2 billion market for the 12th consecutive month in May 2021, reaching $2.5 billion, up 33.5 per cent when compared to same month last year, according to the State Bank of Pakistan.

Remittance inflows during July-March 2021 were mainly sourced from Saudi Arabia at $7 billion, $5.6 billion from the UAE, $3.7 billion from the UK and $2.5 billion from the USA.