Pakistan Has Created a Second Visa System at Its Airports

 

At Karachi airport, I have learned not to treat the immigration counter as a routine stamp before departure. I hand over my passport, watch the officer move through its pages, answer his questions, then wait while a computer screen somewhere behind the glass decides nothing and everything at once. Most journeys continue without drama, but Pakistan's growing offloading system has added a second uncertainty: the country that issued the visa may accept my visit, yet my own government can still stop me from leaving.

I understand why that possibility unsettles travellers. A visa answers whether a foreign state will allow a person to seek entry under stated conditions; it does not cancel Pakistan's lawful power to regulate departure. My objection begins elsewhere, when suspicion becomes an unpublished test and a passenger cannot tell which rule he has failed.

Muhammad Abbas discovered the distinction at Sialkot International Airport on January 31, 2026. He held a valid Nigerian visit visa and a return ticket, while his passport had already received an exit stamp after immigration formalities. FIA officials stopped him because they feared he might abscond during transit in Dubai, although the Lahore High Court later found that the agency had relied on vague apprehension instead of a sufficient legal basis.

A Passport Had Already Been Stamped

Justice Raheel Kamran ruled on May 26 that Muhammad Abbas had been unlawfully offloaded. The Lahore High Court recognised the state's authority to regulate travel, but it rejected an immigration system in which a citizen could lose a journey because an officer suspected an intention that had not been properly established. The distinction matters because it keeps the argument away from a false claim that a foreign visa somehow controls Pakistani immigration law.

An earlier Lahore High Court judgment had already pushed the same principle further into airport procedure. In February, the court ruled that immigration officials must record brief but specific reasons when they prevent a passenger from travelling, then communicate those reasons so the decision can be challenged. The petitioners in that case carried valid Malaysian visit visas along with confirmed travel arrangements, yet officials said they had failed to explain their travel purpose satisfactorily.

I find one part of the dispute especially revealing. Officials questioned the financial capacity of travellers, which sounds reasonable until money becomes a test with no clearly disclosed threshold for the passenger standing at the counter. A traveller can prepare bank statements for a consulate weeks earlier, receive a visa, then reach an airport where another official interprets financial sufficiency through a different and less visible standard.

I have travelled from Karachi to Munich to visit my daughter, so the practical side does not feel theoretical to me. Before leaving home, passports go into one place, supporting papers into another, and the ticket gets checked on the phone more than once even though I already know the departure time. Airport offloading inserts one more question into that small ritual: have I prepared for the published rules, or for the judgment of the officer I happen to meet?

FIA Has a Real Problem to Solve

FIA did not tighten departure screening because officials woke up one morning and decided to make travel difficult. Pakistan has suffered repeated human-smuggling tragedies, including deaths on Mediterranean migration routes, and the agency says around 460 Pakistanis became victims of such incidents over three years. FIA officials reported that at least 377 of those people died, while International Organization for Migration data cited by the agency recorded 109 Pakistani deaths during irregular migration attempts in 2025 alone.

Those deaths changed the logic of airport control. Smugglers do not always place a forged passport in someone's hand and send him directly towards Europe; organised routes may begin with genuine documents and an apparently lawful flight to another country. An immigration officer therefore looks beyond the visa itself because the first destination may only form the beginning of a longer journey.

FIA says it offloaded 39,786 passengers during 2025 under what Additional Director General Immigration Nouman Siddiqui described as an intelligence-driven and risk-based system. Another 34,688 passengers did not depart for non-FIA reasons, according to the agency's account. The scale alone makes offloading more than an occasional airport inconvenience; it has become a significant part of Pakistan's border-control machinery.

FIA also says stricter profiling produced measurable results. Its officials reported lower deportations involving forgery and a reduction in certain forms of irregular migration, while later parliamentary testimony said deportations fell from 68,877 in 2024 to 57,560 in 2025. I do not dismiss such evidence because a state has every reason to prevent citizens from entering a smuggling chain that may end in detention or death.

Pakistan Now Operates a Second Permission System

The problem appears when risk assessment changes character. A visa remains permission from another sovereign state to present oneself for entry under specified conditions; FIA's airport decision concerns whether Pakistan has lawful grounds to restrain departure. When those separate functions blur in practice, the immigration counter starts behaving like a second visa office without the transparency normally attached to the first.

No sticker appears in the passport for this second permission. A traveller does not apply for it weeks before departure, and no embassy website lists its precise documentary standard. The decision emerges at the airport through the officer's assessment of the journey, with the passenger's answers capable of changing what happens next.

I consider that structure dangerous when the underlying criteria remain difficult for ordinary passengers to understand. A first-time traveller may carry a genuine visa and still look suspicious because his travel history is thin; another may use an unusual transit point because the ticket was cheaper. Neither fact proves an intention to disappear abroad, although each may justify further questioning.

A cautious commentator might soften the point. I will not. Pakistan should not turn a lower-income traveller into a suspected future criminal merely because human smugglers also recruit lower-income Pakistanis.

I Recognise the Logic From Banking

The airport system feels familiar to me because banks have worked with risk indicators for years. In transaction monitoring, an unusual payment can trigger an alert because its pattern resembles activity seen in earlier suspicious cases. The alert matters, but no competent compliance officer should confuse the alert itself with proof that the customer has laundered money.

A transaction flag begins an inquiry. The officer examines context and asks whether the apparent anomaly has a reasonable explanation, while the institution records why it closed the alert or escalated the case. Jumping directly from pattern to guilt would make a monitoring system faster, but it would also make the system intellectually weak.

Immigration profiling faces the same problem. A one-way ticket may justify questions because smugglers have used such journeys before, while an unusual transit point can strengthen an officer's concern when other evidence supports it. Neither indicator should become an automatic verdict simply because a computer profile or past case has labelled the pattern risky.

The distinction between risk and proof matters more than the sophistication of the database. A weak system can use advanced technology and still make primitive decisions if officials treat correlation as intention. I would expect an intelligence-driven border system to separate genuine travellers from trafficking cases with greater precision, not merely enlarge the pool of people considered suspicious.

Written Reasons Change the Power Relationship

The Lahore High Court's insistence on written reasons looks procedural, almost boring, until I imagine the airport conversation from the passenger's side. An officer says the journey cannot continue, boarding time keeps moving, and the traveller wants to know what exactly has gone wrong. A verbal answer disappears quickly; a written reason has to survive after the airport lights have gone out.

Justice Kamran's February ruling required immigration authorities to record specific reasons and give them to the affected passenger. The court warned that the absence of a record damages transparency and makes meaningful legal challenge difficult. Once an officer must explain the decision on paper, instinct has to become an administrative judgment that another person can examine.

Accountability within FIA makes the concern harder to dismiss as anti-government exaggeration. A report submitted to the Senate said 85 FIA officials were penalised for misuse of authority in immigration-related matters during 2025, with complaints involving unjustified offloading among the cases examined. Internal discipline does not prove that most immigration officers act wrongly, but it does prove that discretionary power sometimes fails in exactly the place where passengers say it fails.

Karachi appears directly in that record. FIA material cited in the Senate report included complaints involving passengers at Jinnah International Airport, while national offloading figures show how heavily Pakistan now relies on airport intervention to manage irregular migration risk. The issue has moved well beyond one angry passenger missing one flight.

Human Smuggling Has Changed the Ordinary Traveller

A smuggler can build an illegal migration route around legitimate documents. The passport may be genuine, and the first visa can also be real, while the criminal arrangement lies in what happens after arrival somewhere else. FIA therefore tries to identify the journey hidden behind the declared journey.

I understand the temptation. If officers wait until a Pakistani reaches Libya or disappears during transit, prevention has already failed and the consequences may become irreversible. Yet predictive enforcement always carries the same danger: the government starts acting on what it believes a citizen will do, not only on what the evidence shows he has done.

Picture a first-time traveller under the hard white lights of an airport hall. He has never spoken to an immigration officer before, his English becomes awkward under questioning, and nervousness begins to look like deception because the official already suspects the route. The screening process can then manufacture part of the behaviour it treats as evidence.

Law exists partly to interrupt such loops. Written reasons force the state to specify what turned suspicion into a decision, while judicial review gives an affected citizen somewhere to take the paper afterwards. Without those safeguards, risk profiling can quietly become social profiling.

A Visa Does Not Guarantee Departure, but Suspicion Cannot Replace Law

Critics of the offloading debate often make one valid point: possession of a visa does not create an absolute entitlement to board an aircraft. I agree. Pakistan can impose lawful restrictions on departure, and immigration officials can scrutinise whether a traveller appears to be violating emigration law.

My argument starts after that concession. If the state overrides an otherwise lawful journey, it should identify the legal basis and explain the evidence that produced the restriction. The decision also needs a record because a power that cannot be reviewed after it has been exercised easily becomes a power governed by convenience.

FIA's task remains difficult. Smuggling networks change routes when governments tighten controls, while genuine passengers sometimes resemble the risk profiles those networks create. A serious border system has to live inside that uncertainty without converting uncertainty itself into guilt.

I keep returning to Muhammad Abbas's passport because the physical detail captures the contradiction better than any constitutional phrase. His Nigerian visa was valid, his journey had passed through formal immigration processing, and an exit stamp already sat inside the passport before another official stopped him. The journey had moved far enough for the state to say yes once.

The Border Before the Gate

Pakistan's departure counter now performs more than document verification. Officers increasingly assess whether the story behind a journey appears believable, which places intention inside routine border control and gives risk assessment far greater weight than most travellers realise. Human smuggling has pushed the state towards prediction because waiting for certainty often means waiting until the victim has already left Pakistan.

The courts have begun building limits around that power. FIA still has to protect people from organised smugglers, but an officer who blocks a citizen's journey now faces growing pressure to explain why the restriction satisfies law and due process. The clash will not disappear because both the security problem and the constitutional problem are real.

At Jinnah International Airport, passports will keep sliding beneath the glass. Officers will type into immigration systems while departure boards change above them, and most travellers will eventually pick up their documents and walk towards the gate. Somewhere in the same hall, another passenger may discover that his visa answered only the first question.

The harder question belongs to Pakistan.

Whether the answer rests on evidence or suspicion may depend on a conversation lasting only a few minutes.