East European state invites up to 150,000 Pakistanis

Proper conditions will be created for the migrant laborers from the South Asian country, the Belarusian president has said

Belarus will soon accept up to 150,000 migrant workers from Pakistan, the Eastern European country’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, has said.

Lukashenko made the announcement after a meeting with Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif in Minsk on Friday.

The Belarusian leader said that Sharif and him had agreed that “in the near future [Pakistani] specialists in various fields will be sent [to Belarus]; the fields of our choosing. The leadership of Pakistan will help us select such people.”

“Let it be 100,000 or maybe 120,000 or 150,000 of these specialists. We are ready to accept them in Belarus and create the necessary conditions for them to work here,” he said.

The Pakistani prime minister assured that the workers that his country will be sending to Belarus will be “highly qualified and capable of providing real help to your country.”

“They are hardworking, they have skills, they have families to support. They can create the very bridge that we are building between Minsk and Islamabad,” he said.

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Sharif thanked Lukashenko, whom he described as his “brother,” for inviting the migrant workers. “Believe me, this offer made my day,” he said.

Just over 60,000 migrant workers were employed in Belarus, which has a population of about 9.1 million, in 2024, the country’s deputy trade minister, Tatyana Astreiko, said in November. Around 40% of them were Russians, she added.

”We understand that domestic labor resources are limited. Foreign migrants are being brought in to provide employers with personnel. This is a given and an inevitability,” Astreiko stressed.

There has been a spike in the flow of migrants across the border between Belarus and Poland since 2021. Last year, around 2,500 crossings into the EU country were recorded every month, despite Warsaw constructing a border fence and pushing back large groups of people.

The Polish Foreign Ministry has claimed that Belarus is deliberately inviting asylum seekers in and instructing them to enter Poland, at the behest of the Russian security services. Moscow and Minsk have both denied any role in the migrant influx.

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Most of the refugees are from the Middle East and North Africa and enter Poland in order to travel onward to Western Europe, where benefits for asylum seekers are more generous.