1111Ten months down, diaspora chatter is downbeat.

The intuitive reasoning

is that things haven’t improved much under the PTI. In reality, the reasons
may have more to do with the diaspora’s mindset.

The fact is that the US-based diaspora is far more parochial than one would
expect of a relatively successful, well assimilated expat community. To
complicate matters, successive governments in Pakistan have failed to
translate their desire to extract greater support from overseas Pakistanis into
targeted strategies that appeal to the diaspora in question.

Take US-based diaspora in white-collar jobs. They have the greatest potential
to do more. Unskilled and semi-skilled labour are already helping to their
maximum ability by sending remittances to their families.

Ten months down, diaspora chatter is downbeat.

Highly skilled professionals tend to help in four ways: contribute to
philanthropic causes in Pakistan; invest in profitable ventures that generate
local economic activity; use their influence in US policy circles to promote
Pakistan’s case; and physically relocate back to put their skill sets to use. In
each case, things aren’t operating at potential.

Large funds pour into Pakistan for philanthropic causes. A 2007 book by Adil
Najam, Portrait of a Giving Community, documented how Pakistani-
Americans have kept up the spirit of charity. These inflows, however, are
haphazard, most often transferred through informal family networks and
usually devoid of any larger understanding of overall needs. The state must be
faulted for not having a mechanism to define national priorities for in-bound
philanthropic contributions. There are also no transparent mechanisms that
would allow the donors to know, beyond doubt, that the funds have reached
their intended recipients if they were to channel them to more strategic
initiatives coordinated by the state.

The diaspora have shied away from private efforts to pool resources going to
identical causes. The result is redundancy and a supply-demand mismatch in
terms of where the money ends up.

The diaspora’s commercial investment choices also tend to be driven by an

extremely conservative mindset. Too many expats gravitate towards investing
in ‘safe’ sectors, most prominently real estate. Millions of dollars therefore
pour in to be parked in what is arguably one of the least fruitful sectors from
the point of view of generating local economic activity.
The state can be critiqued for lagging in creating adequate incentives to alter
this behaviour. But I suspect the kind of investment certainty the diaspora
want is impossible to provide in Pakistan’s current context. State efforts would
have to be combined with a more entrepreneurial spirit and less jaundiced
view of doing business in Pakistan.

In terms of political influence, the politically active diaspora have failed to

make their mark. In Washington, D.C., many influential Pakistanis are active
in trying to improve Pakistan-US ties. But as an aggregate, the community is
as divided by petty issues and personality clashes as they would be in a
Pakistani context. Successive Pakistani ambassadors in Washington have tried
and failed to gel these influencers together.

Finally, the discourse around public service in Pakistan is often too entitled for
my liking. Most successful diaspora feel they’d be doing the country a favour if
they move back and work for the state. Most are looking for the right
prominence to take the plunge. I experienced this myself recently in the wake
of misinformation that I had accepted a job in the public sector and was
returning to Pakistan. Some encouraged me to base my decision on the
prominence of the job, not on the kind of contribution I could make. And most
were against it, arguing that I would be wasting my time and effort in an
unappreciating environment.

Pakistanis in the US have every right to expect the Pakistani state to do more
for them. But they must also be willing to come out of their shell. They have
much to learn from their Indian counterparts. The much-famed Indian
diaspora in Silicon Valley delivered for India despite the red tape of the Indian
system. They did not let it deter them; they became politically relevant by
sidestepping parochial interests and organising their lobbying model along the
lines of the American Jewish community; and more and more Indians in
America are voluntarily returning to their country — despite the bureaucratic
and systemic hurdles that await them.

The writer is the author of Brokering Peace in Nuclear Environments: US

Crisis Management in South Asia.