When the Western dream is over

IF the age of American welcome is over, so is the age of the Pakistani-American dream, with the 2026 American immigration visa freeze halting all current immigration processes in 75 countries, including Pakistan.

People in developing countries have held this dream, or similar, for decades: to migrate to the US, or Canada, or the UK, or Australia, through a variety of methods — education, an H1B visa, family reunification policies, asylum and refugee pathways. Their success is dependent on fulfilling official requirements and a healthy dose of luck, sometimes even divine intervention. Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid reimagined these pathways as supernatural portals in his fantasy novel Exit West, where ordinary people fleeing civil war fled through magical doors and sometimes appeared in Western countries.

Now governments in the UK, Europe, Canada, Australia and the US, responding to populist movements and overstressed social systems, are closing those magic doors for Pakistanis and other citizens of the Global South. Smooth and unencumbered immigration to America, or the West in general, is becoming a distant dream, evaporating so quickly that the next generation won’t even remember it anymore.

There are two ways to remove a Band-Aid: rip it off fast or peel it away slowly. The UK has been doing it gradually: in April 2024, the UK increased savings requirements for immigration £18,000 to £29,000; currently there is a proposal to double the residency requirement for citizenship from five to 10 years. Then in December 2024 nine universities in the UK put a freeze on student admissions from Pakistan and Bangladesh, saying that too many students were entering on fraudulent applications, or claiming asylum while studying in the UK. Many students woke up to find their conditional applications withdrawn, with universities demanding 100 per cent tuition upfront instead of accepting 50pc deposits, as they did previously.

How do Pakistanis adjust to a world where they can no longer readily leave their country for foreign shores?

In America, over 300,000 Pakistanis emigrated to the US since 1995, with the total Pakistani-American population reaching 400,000 in 2025. Trump was re-elected to the presidency in late 2024; soon after his inauguration, the US enacted travel bans on 38 Global South countries in 2025. In January 2026, the US halted processing all immigrant visas from 75 countries, Pakistan included. This was paired with massive ICE raids in cities and towns all over America to root out ‘illegal migrants’, characterised as criminals and frauds. Here the Band-Aid has been ripped off quickly.

In the US, students from Pakistan now face F1 visa refusal rates of 50pc, Canada in the north rejects Pakistani students at a staggering rate of 76pc, and Australia refuses 40pc of Pakistanis who apply to study there. In Karachi, the Goethe Institute is packed with students who aspire to study in Germany for free, then stay on — as Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz limited asylum but increased skilled worker immigration. But one day that magical door will be closed too, when right-wing pressure and economic downturn force a rollback there as well.

The question remains, then: how do Pakistanis (and by extension, other Global South countries) adjust to a world where they can no longer readily leave Pakistan for foreign shores? We can look forward to a slowing down of our brain drain, but those who are already highly educated and trained at top US institutions or working in the UK and Canada are unlikely to move back to Pakistan. The brain drain will not be reversed in our lifetime, unless a major catastrophe drives them back home.

In Booker Prize-winning author Kiran Desai’s novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Desai writes about how much of the Western dream is created for young, bright and ambitious students by their parents, who want to brag about how their kids are at an Ivy League university or working at a Big Tech company with all the benefits. Meanwhile, their children are lonely and homesick, suffering in ways that the parents can’t comprehend, as in the case of Sonia, who is always crying on the phone. Her parents scoff at her troubles, unable to understand how anyone can be lonely when they have achieved the (read: their parents’) American dream!

The question to ask as the dream is disappearing: what next? Perhaps Pakistanis who have no choice but to remain will focus their energies on improving things in Pakistan instead of searching for better opportunities elsewhere. Perhaps the closing of magic doors will result in the emergence of high-earning businesses, profitable technology companies, home-grown universities that will give our brilliant students quality higher education. All of this has long been considered a pipe dream, with many countries like Pakistan ruled by the type of dysfunctional governments that have been driving the nation towards economic and political chaos for the last 70-odd years. Maybe without those escape routes to the West, citizens will increase pressure on our governments to perform better, or risk being ousted the way Sheikh Hasina was recently overthrown in Bangladesh by angry Gen Z-ers, following the example of students in Nepal.

Maybe the Western dream has been so overbearing that it’s made a functioning and liveable Pakistan impossible to achieve. For decades we have willingly sacrificed our best and brightest in the hope of a “better life” economically, socially, politically — or saved them, depending on how you perceive life in Pakistan. Maybe, we should stop trying to catch up with a West that enriched itself on the resources and labour of the Global South through rampant colonisation for 300 years. But will the middle and upper classes of our countries endure the indignity of a life in the Global South without being able to urge its children to better chances in ‘the West’? We’d better have our eyes open when they close the magic doors for good.

The writer currently teaches Expository Writing at AKUFAS.

Published in Dawn, March 4th, 2026

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