Pakistani Gulf remittances propped up Zia’s regime and exported domestic labor unrest

Evidence

By the 1970s, the migration of South Asian labor to the Middle East as temporary workers had reached massive proportions (Addleton 1992; Gardezi 1995). In Pakistan, migration for the most part was not regulated by the government until 1979, when institutions were established to oversee and protect overseas Pakistanis. Until that moment, much of the migration to the Middle East from Pakistan was informal and relied on personal networks based on word of mouth and kinship (Abella 1987). Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s—and more recently in the 2000s—the majority of labor migrants from Pakistan have been male and employed as temporary workers in the middle to lower tiers of the service economy. They worked in fields that ranged from construction and oil refining to driving and semiskilled air-conditioner maintenance. When the state began taking an interest in labor migration in the late 1970s, it initially became involved in facilitating state-to-state contracts and controlling remittances (Arif and Irfan 1997; Azam 1995; Irfan 1986; Kazi 1989). For the state, labor contracts represent a boon to the national economy (Azam 1995). Indeed, as one economist argues, remittances from workers in the Gulf kept the military regime of Zia ul-Haq afloat through the 1980s and continue to have a significant influence on the Pakistani economy (Zaidi 1999, 431). … Providing avenues of migration to the Middle East, however, also became a way for the Pakistani government to export domestic labor unrest and demands to reform labor laws. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 497

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: ‘exporting dissent’ as a state strategy — sending workers abroad to defuse domestic labor politics, and how remittances buy regime survival. Connects to contemporary debates about migration as a safety valve.