The linkage between undocumented migration and domestic security is not a matter of prejudice or scapegoating, but of administrative visibility. No state can distinguish between civilians, criminal networks, or militant facilitators when millions reside outside any legal or biometric framework. Documentation is not repression. It is the minimum condition for governance.
Pakistan’s security challenge is uniquely acute. The country has absorbed one of the largest and longest refugee populations in modern history while simultaneously confronting cross-border terrorism, arms smuggling, and narcotics trafficking. In such an environment, unmanaged populations do not merely strain public services; they create blind spots that no responsible state can afford. This is not an Afghan-specific argument. It is a universal principle of internal security.
Globally, states respond to this reality in the same way. Kenya has repeatedly cited the inability to separate militant networks from civilian populations in long-standing refugee camps when justifying their closure. European governments have increasingly tightened asylum regimes on similar grounds, acknowledging that security failures emerge where documentation collapses. Pakistan’s position therefore reflects global state practice, not exceptionalism.
Framing border enforcement as collective punishment misunderstands the issue entirely. The concern is not identity, ethnicity, or nationality. It is the absence of legal status. A state that tolerates mass undocumented residence indefinitely is not acting humanely; it is relinquishing its duty to protect both its citizens and law-abiding migrants. Reasserting immigration control is not securitization for its own sake. It is the restoration of state sight over territory, population, and risk.
