Rohingya in Pakistan

Pakistani census operations do not recognize "Rohingya" as an independent ethnic category; community members are instead enumerated as "Bengalis" or recorded as undocumented foreign nationals. [H1] Early arrivals, particularly those who came before or during the early 1970s, were sometimes absorbed into the state fabric: some received paper National Identity Cards under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's administration in 1973 to 1974, and a handful of elderly community members still hold Pakistani passports dating to 1954. [L9]

That window later closed. The cutoff year used to verify entry documents was retroactively moved from 1982 back to 1978, invalidating the paperwork of thousands who had arrived in the intervening years. [L9] When NADRA introduced Computerized National Identity Cards in 2000, a verification drive led to the widespread blocking and cancellation of cards already held by ethnic Bengalis and Rohingya. [E4,L1] The same year's Foreigners (Amendment) Ordinance created the National Aliens Registration Authority (NARA) to issue Alien Registration Cards to non-citizens, but accepting one required formally declaring oneself a foreign "alien," forfeiting any citizenship claim and triggering cancellation of the family's existing CNICs, so most of the community refused. [L9] Second- and third-generation Rohingya born on Pakistani soil remain legally unrecognized despite constitutional provisions for birthright citizenship. [L2,L3]

No bilateral repatriation agreement exists between Pakistan and Myanmar, and no repatriation movement, voluntary or forced, has taken place from Pakistani territory. Pakistan's 2023 to 2024 "Illegal Foreigners' Repatriation Plan" was aimed overwhelmingly at Afghans, who make up over 95% of the country's registered refugee population, but its broad "illegal foreigner" language did not distinguish by nationality, raising the risk of arbitrary detention for undocumented Rohingya even though no mass deportations to Myanmar have followed, since no diplomatic or transit channel for that exists. [L4,L5]

Because Pakistan's Rohingya hold no formal refugee status and live in informal urban settlements rather than administered camps, they fall outside the frameworks that provide displaced Rohingya in Bangladesh with World Food Programme rations, ration cards, or UN-coordinated nutrition assistance. [E8] None of that infrastructure exists here.

Food security instead depends entirely on daily-wage household income and informal, community-level self-help: bodies such as the Social Aid Committee in Burmi Colony coordinate local emergency relief, and national faith-based charities, notably the Al-Khidmat Foundation (the humanitarian wing of Jamaat-i-Islami), periodically run food distribution and welfare drives in poorer settlements such as Arkanabad. [E8] High poverty levels still leave much of the population exposed to food-price inflation with no formal safety net behind them.

Housing across Karachi's Rohingya settlements is characterized by dense urban poverty and environmental exposure. In Machhar Colony, built largely on land reclaimed from tidal swamp and mangrove beside Karachi's harbor, structures are predominantly kutcha (temporary) or semi-pucca and vulnerable to seasonal flooding; residents describe open sewage, standing water, and constant garbage burning in the narrow streets. [E2,E3] Piped municipal drinking water is largely absent, forcing reliance on commercial water tankers or contaminated groundwater, which drives high rates of waterborne illness. [E2]

Household sizes are large, averaging roughly ten people (typically parents, six or more children, and paternal grandparents), and average monthly household earnings hover around PKR 15,000, pushing many adult men into multiple daily-wage jobs to cover basic subsistence. [E8] Remittances from relatives working in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Malaysia, or Turkey supplement local income for many families. [E8] Externally, the community tends toward strong social conservatism and self-isolation as a protective strategy against discrimination: women rarely appear in public without a male chaperone, and full head-to-toe niqabs are common. [E8]

The security environment is shaped by routine law-enforcement pressure rather than open conflict. In settlements like Burmi Colony, law enforcement and paramilitary units such as the Sindh Rangers conduct neighborhood searches roughly every ten days, typically framed as counter-narcotics or weapons sweeps, and men lacking a CNIC are vulnerable to arrest under the Foreigners Act. According to community accounts, police officers frequently demand bribes to release detained residents or to avoid having identity papers flagged for blocking. [L9]

This legal vulnerability carries into the workplace. Unregistered laborers in hazardous sectors, including the Gadani ship-breaking yard and deep-sea fishing trawlers, are frequently assigned high-risk tasks without safety equipment. [E8] When accidents cause injury or death, the lack of state-recognized identity documents prevents families from filing a formal police report (FIR) or claiming workplace compensation, so these casualties go unrecorded in official statistics. [E8]

Rohingya in Pakistan are not confined behind physical fences or perimeter guards, but movement is still constrained by administrative barriers. A valid CNIC is required to travel between cities by bus, train, or domestic flight, and to pass permanent checkpoints along major highways, so undocumented individuals risk detention simply by traveling. [L9]

A chain of documentation requirements compounds this: without a CNIC, a person cannot pass biometric registration; without biometric registration, they cannot legally register a mobile SIM card or open a formal bank or mobile-money account (such as EasyPaisa or JazzCash); and without a registered SIM or bank account, formal commercial transport and inter-provincial travel become largely inaccessible. [L9] In Pakistan, activating a SIM requires real-time biometric verification against the NADRA database, a requirement undocumented Rohingya cannot meet, so many rely on SIM cards registered under the names of sympathetic Pakistani citizens to stay in touch with family and manage remittances, a workaround that itself carries financial risk. [L9]

The community's economic life is stratified into roughly three tiers. At the base, the marine sector employs large numbers of women and girls as daily-wage shrimp peelers in harsh, unprotected conditions in Machhar Colony, paid per basket peeled, alongside men working as crew on deep-sea fishing vessels out of the Keamari and Korangi harbors. [E2,E3,E5] A secondary tier works unskilled daily-wage jobs in Korangi's textile factories or hazardous ship-breaking at the Gadani yard. [E8] A small, comparatively wealthy merchant tier has built a jewelry trade out of Karachi's Burma Colony since the 1990s, with some traders expanding into Saudi Arabia and the UAE, alongside a small number of educated second-generation Rohingya who have become teachers, bank clerks, or college professors. [E8]

Structural barriers cap mobility between these tiers: formal corporate employment, public-sector jobs, and registered banking all require a verified CNIC, and job applications listing addresses in recognized Rohingya settlements like Burmi Colony are routinely rejected. [E8]

Federal and provincial policy requires a parent's CNIC and a NADRA-issued child registration certificate (B-Form) to enroll a child in government-run schools, which bars the large majority of Rohingya children from the state system outright. [L9]

In response, the community built its own informal alternative. Community-funded schools such as the Arakan Muslim Secondary School in Burmi Colony, enrolling roughly 800 students, about 60% of them girls, offer basic primary and secondary education entirely outside state recognition. [E8] NGO and religious institutions fill further gaps: charitable primary centers run by groups like the Al-Khidmat Foundation, alongside local madrassas offering Quranic memorization (Hafiz-e-Quran) training. Burmi Colony alone maintains 13 mosques and 8 madrassas. [E8] Because none of these community schools can issue NADRA-linked matriculation certificates, students who complete them still face structural barriers to accredited higher education or professional degree programs, so a generation is being schooled largely outside any system that leads to a recognized qualification.

The Rohingya presence in Pakistan sits at the center of sharply divided narratives. State and security officials frame undocumented non-citizens primarily as a security concern and a strain on public infrastructure. [L9] Provincial political groups in Sindh have at times cast the issue in demographic terms, alleging that undocumented Bengali and Rohingya populations shift the ethnic balance of urban Karachi. [L9] International and domestic rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, point to a stark contradiction: Pakistan's government has repeatedly and vocally condemned Myanmar's military campaign against the Rohingya on international platforms, while denying citizenship, identity documents, and public education to a community that has lived inside Pakistan for over half a century. [L6,H1]

Facing this, many in the community engage in what amounts to strategic identity-masking: publicly identifying as "Bengalis" who arrived before 1971 rather than as Rohingya or Burmese, since a pre-1971 Bengali migration narrative offers a more workable path through NADRA's bureaucracy and reduces law-enforcement scrutiny, whereas openly claiming Rakhine or Arakan origin forecloses any citizenship route entirely. According to Bengali community leaders in Karachi, this is a conscious, practical strategy rather than a simple mislabeling. [H3] The result is a community whose identity is preserved internally within its own social networks but often obscured in every interaction with the Pakistani state.