Two more members of an airline from Pakistan slipped away in Toronto recently. This brings to eight such incidents in the past one year. It is not a recent or unusual phenomenon as all over the world people wishing to migrate to other countries without waiting for the time-consuming and sometimes expensive legal migration process opt for this kind of behavior.
It is not only airlines but ships whose crews slip away when they dock at a port in a country which attracts their desire to immigrate. When in Ottawa I met with a gentleman who later became my good friend and he narrated for me his adventure to literally drop into Canada to seek its citizenship.
He was working on a Pakistani cargo-ship when they docked in the Canadian port of Montreal. One night he was standing on deck and was suddenly seized with the desire to settle in Canada permanently and just jumped off the ship.
The rest is history and today his third generation is enjoying life in the capital city of Ottawa. This happened in the early 70s and at that time it was not very difficult to obtain legal status in most countries, including Canada. It was even easier if you were associated with the profession of nursing and as far as I know that is still the case.
Even now American and Canadian medical establishments are looking for male and female nurses. I remember recruiting teams arriving from the USA in Canada every year to recruit nursing and other health related staff. This is still going on and the best bet for those seeking immigration to Canada or USA is to get the required training but it has to be up to their standards.
In Pakistan there are a lot of institutions offering nursing and other health related staff trainings. Actually, there are 213 Universities and Colleges that are offering (Regular and Online) BS Nursing in Pakistan. School of Nursing and Midwifery, SONAM, the first academic unit of the Aga Khan University in Pakistan founded in 1980, has led the way in introducing new academic programmes in nursing and midwifery while several government hospitals also offer such programmes but for the ordinary middle classes the course fees are prohibitive preventing children from lower classes to enroll and enhance their chances to move ahead in this profession.
I wonder why some philanthropist organization does not arrange world class nursing courses for young men and women of Pakistan so on graduation they can find gainful appointment overseas. This will be a win-win situation as those graduating could find good employment opportunities overseas and the state benefit from earning foreign exchange.
Getting back to the question of illegal immigration it has become much harder to enter any country illegally. This is a result of the floods of immigrants that have practically invaded European countries after the failed so-called Arab Spring.
Hundreds of thousands have died on the high seas in their bid to escape the relentless violence and hardships in their native countries. In North America things are not much different. Who would have ever imagined that there would be a wall on the Mexico and USA border? In the seventies we in Canada would go grocery and petrol shopping to US border towns of Ogdensburg and Water Town by just showing our Canadian driving licenses.
Visitors to the USA were welcomed with open arms. Not any more as there is now strict check and control and you need all updated documents to visit your neighbors. There is also a flood of immigration seeking individuals from South America and crowds are travelling long distances to seek a better life in the USA.
As the world population increases unchecked and unemployment increases by leaps and bounds the floods of refugees across the globe will only increase and incidents such as employees of airlines and ships jumping ship to seek a better life will become more frequent. The only way authorities across the globe can reduce such incidents is to take concrete steps to provide decent jobs and appropriate standard of living for their populations in their own countries. Anything short of this and the flow of legal and illegal immigrants will rise steadily to uncontrollable proportions.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
The writer is a well-known columnist
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