Pakistan has a habit of misdiagnosis. When growth stalls or exports disappoint, we look for a convenient culprit rather than an uncomfortable truth. Sometimes it’s traders. Sometimes it’s real estate. Sometimes it’s “consumption culture.” And now, increasingly, remittances have entered the accused list, portrayed as a quiet macroeconomic villain holding the country back.

These days some high-flying economists are peddling analyses and theories criticizing remittances and their critique fits neatly into this narrative. It is intellectually clean, theoretically sound, and deeply unsatisfying once you step outside the model and into Pakistan.

The argument, in short, is that remittances, now roughly $35-38 billion a year, close to 10% of GDP, fuel consumption, weaken exports, appreciate the real exchange rate, and lock the economy into a low-productivity equilibrium. It sounds persuasive. But it also assumes a version of Pakistan that doesn’t exist.

Let’s start with the most basic question that theory tends to rush past: why do remittances exist at this scale in the first place? Pakistan did not choose to be a labour-exporting economy. People leave because jobs at home are scarce, wages are stagnant, productivity is weak, and the state has failed, repeatedly, to build a credible, stable growth engine. Migration is not an economic preference; it is an economic verdict.

That means remittances are not the cause of Pakistan’s structural failure. They are the response to it.

This distinction matters. Treating remittances as a........

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