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.........

© Dawn