Why the UAE stopped giving Pakistanis visas

A banless ban, and how Pakistani UAE visas got this tight

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Owais Barlas as someone who, by virtue of his day job — helping Pakistanis set up businesses and visas in the UAE — sits closer to the on-ground reality than almost anyone in the public conversation. Muzamil notes that the topic has been one of the most-watched on the channel, which surprised him, and that the demand justified a longer, more careful sit-down.

Owais’s opening framing is precise. “There is no comprehensive ban,” he says of the UAE’s posture toward Pakistani applicants. “Things have become tight. They are going to get tighter.” The tightening, in his telling, did not start this year. It started two to three years ago when the UAE began quietly blacklisting specific Pakistani cities — meaning passports issued out of those regions had near-zero chance of approval. The blacklist has crept up to roughly twenty cities. Five or six of Pakistan’s largest are on it.

He compares the effect to “poison” working through the system over two years until it reached the present moment, where even applications from outside the blacklisted cities are getting rejected at unprecedented rates. Family visas, which were straightforward as recently as last year, have followed the same curve. “I know some of the cases because in my field I hear this every day,” Owais tells Muzamil. “Someone’s sister’s visa isn’t getting approved, someone’s mother’s isn’t. And things are going to be more tight.” The system, he says, keeps getting manipulated, and each manipulation triggers a fresh round of restrictions.

The agent economy is the problem, not the solution

Muzamil presses on the question every Pakistani family eventually asks: are the agents charging two lakh rupees per visa actually doing something legitimate, or are they gambling with applicants’ money?

Owais’s answer is unsparing. “If an agent is taking money from you, he is definitely doing some second- or third-rate work to get you in. So somewhere along the line, the agent is one of the reasons you don’t get a chance to be here.” He puts a number on it: in his estimation, eighty percent of the white- and blue-collar Pakistani visa cases that fail through agents fail because of what the agent did, not who the applicant is.

The underlying dynamic is desperation. “People are so desperate to come to Dubai,” he says. “You give them a number, you give them a price, and they don’t even ask how it works. Just get me a visa somehow.” The applicant believes, incorrectly, that “visa” is a synonym for sorted life — work permit, job, future, all of it. In reality, he reminds Muzamil, a visa in any country is just an entry permission. Nothing more.

Layered on top of the agent problem is the so-called “azaad visa” — the freelance-style work visa that Pakistanis have come to treat as a passport to job-hop within the UAE. Owais is blunt: it is a myth. By law, you remain bound to the sponsor whose company is on your file. You cannot legally work elsewhere, you cannot prove an informal arrangement if something goes wrong, and the market has been so flooded with these visas that the UAE’s preference for Pakistani labour has collapsed. “It’s a big myth,” he says. “Someone in a company gave a visa to his brother, and from there it became people opening companies to sponsor themselves.” Authorities now stop fakirs on the road, check IDs, and find them carrying investor-status documents.

”Why Pakistanis?” — the question the UAE is asking itself

The most uncomfortable section of the conversation is when Owais lays out the UAE’s own internal logic. He frames it as a question the country is now asking on the supply side. “Out of one hundred thousand visitors, ninety-five thousand don’t even take a hotel. They stay sharing with friends. Your visitor isn’t a quality visitor.” Multinationalities are available. People are cheaper. So: “Why Pakistanis?” he asks. “A nation that isn’t paying you anything. A nation that goes back after four or five years. A nation that’s been in scams, in fraud. Why us, actually?”

He walks through the chain of incidents that has hardened that question into policy. NADRA card attestation became mandatory because Afghan-issued Pakistani passports surfaced. Visit-visa volumes were cut down because the channel was being abused. The Talabat protest — two hundred riders standing in a public square in Dubai demanding Imran Khan be freed, posting TikToks from a properly regulated foreign company’s payroll — landed badly. Muzamil does not push back. Owais’s summary lands cleanly: “We are doing this. We are doing it in this country. In our own country, if even five percent of this happened, we’d run people over with our cars. But we go to their country and manipulate the system.”

There is, he says, still a real pathway for legitimate applicants. Investors are still getting visas. Skill-based profiles — IT, AI, coders, qualified professionals with a clean travel history and a coherent profile — are still being approved. The UAE is moving “the way every developed country moves,” tying documents to documents, tightening the funnel. The pain is being felt because the previous bar was so low. “Earlier you just sent a passport copy and a picture,” he says. “Now there is a proper process, like every other country in the world.”

Amnesty windows, and what to expect next

Later in the discussion the two work through what changes around UAE amnesty periods, which Owais says he has good internal visibility into. During amnesty, penalties on overstayed visas get waived, and historically rejection rates have softened on either side of the window. He does not promise this will reverse the broader tightening — but he expects some short-term loosening, especially for users whose primary need is to clear a penalty record. The majority of those users, he tells Muzamil, are Pakistani.

What he does not expect to reverse is the underlying shift toward skill-based intake. Autonomous vehicles are coming, and they are coming to Dubai first — Muzamil makes the point that Pakistan’s two largest UAE worker categories, taxi driving and delivery, sit directly in their path. Construction is harder to automate but every other layer above it — the manager, the accountant, the back-office — is already disproportionately filled by Indian professionals because, Owais says flatly, the Indian candidate shows up presentable and the Pakistani one often does not.

The education pipeline doesn’t fit the world

The conversation pivots into what is, in Muzamil’s framing, the upstream problem. He cites an HEC report he had recently read: roughly sixty percent of Pakistan’s graduates last year came out of humanities programmes. Sociology. Philosophy. “I’m not saying sociology is a bad field,” Muzamil says, “but if you’re coming from a lower-middle or middle-income background and you needed a job, you should have been a nawab to study sociology. Sociology is not solving the problems of the region.”

The science graduates do not fare much better. They are coming out of bachelor’s programmes in physics or biology — which, Muzamil notes, was the right shape of degree in the 1950s and is the wrong shape now, in an economy that has moved to AI, cyber security, fintech. Meanwhile Europe is on record needing three million caregivers and nurses by 2030. The skill bar is not high. It is teachable. And the country is not building toward it.

Owais’s diagnosis cuts to parenting and direction. He describes his own trajectory — matric, then commerce, with no real sense of where any of it was going. His wife, he says, wanted to go into agricultural sustainability in 2008. Her parents wanted her in medical. She did neither. The country, he argues, keeps pushing children through tracks set by their parents’ nostalgia for nineties-era professions while the world reorganises around skills that can be taught in weeks from YouTube. “You can learn all these things for free,” he tells Muzamil. “You don’t have access? You have to find something somewhere. We are not so badly off that we have nothing.”

The language failure compounds it. Fourteen to fifteen years of English-medium curriculum, Owais notes, and no one can actually speak English. The entire region around Pakistan speaks Arabic. Pakistanis pray in Arabic five times a day and could not tell you, if asked, what they were saying. “We were taught at that time that we are so dumb that we don’t even know what we are doing."

"We are all patients of ego”

By the second half of the conversation, the two are no longer talking about visas. They are talking about why the people who could leave Pakistan never get organised enough to try.

Owais frames it as a problem of small things — of immunity from the disciplines that compound. “We have to become human first. Then educated. Human, we become at home.” Not throwing rubbish on the street. Smiling at people. Lowering your head in front of an elder. He argues these are the basic errors that, uncorrected from childhood, produce adults who cannot get out of their own way. When he travels back to Pakistan, he says, these small frictions are what exhaust him before any large thinking is possible. “These small things dry you out so much that you can’t think big.”

Muzamil’s contribution to this section is the harder, more uncomfortable claim — that Pakistani culture is actively hostile to discipline. Owais agrees from his own experience. “I decided to be the most disciplined one in my home. My life starts at eight a.m. — for the last fifteen years. In Pakistan there is no concept of being alive at eight a.m. Being super-disciplined in Pakistan makes you a fool. People called me an owl. My own friends told me, maybe you need to see somebody, mentally there must be something wrong, you’re up before sunrise on a Sunday. People discourage you for being good.” When he arrived in Dubai, he found people more disciplined than him — running on the beach at four a.m. while he was running at six. That, he says, is what the city sold him.

Muzamil tells a story to close the loop. At the Serena in Islamabad — the pinnacle, in his framing, of the Islamabad elite circuit — he watched a staff member, who had been crisp and businesslike with him moments earlier, dissolve into “sir, I am so sorry, sir, sir” the instant a celebrity walked into the same space. “That’s when I understood why people behave like this in Pakistan,” he says. “Because our people are such idiots that they actually respond to this. If I am nice to you, you are rude to me. The moment I act superior, you fold.” He arrives at the philosophical version: “In Pakistan, unfortunately, we are all patients of ego. And every Sufi, every philosopher you read, says the same thing — if you want to max out your life, kill your ego.”

Owais’s contribution is the deeper version of the same observation. He has seen, he says, bank managers in Karachi’s Defence branch sitting at the feet of a pir in their own cabins, American education and all. “Once the system puts a block in your mind, nobody can remove it.” He frames it as the frog-in-the-well problem: people who criticise abroad without ever having spent a year of effort getting there. “The person sitting in Pakistan won’t even give himself one year. It took me eleven years to get here.”

Dress, presentation, and the cost of a chain

The two close with a deliberately small story that crystallises the larger argument. Muzamil describes a personal experiment. He had always travelled in a button-down shirt and dress pants. Nobody ever stopped him. Once, he flew to Dubai wearing baggy pants and a chain. Security stopped him before he reached the desk. “What kind of businessman are you?” the officer asked. He had not changed countries. He had not changed passports. He had changed an outfit.

Owais matches it with a memory from Karachi between 2005 and 2010, when the “mommy-daddy” segment — his term — would buy converse and trusted brands from the Sunday market in Defence, the same money they would have spent at a local mall, in order to look the part. The choice, he says, was always available. The people who took it ended up in rooms the others never reached. “If you are presentable, there is a slightly higher chance somebody will listen to you. Your billion-dollar plan, if you show up looking like a beggar, nobody is going to trust you.”

Muzamil’s closing frame is, by his own admission, a rant — but a deliberate one. He acknowledges every macro problem Owais has described, then refuses to let the listener off the hook with them. “One million Pakistanis left last year. So someone, there was a pool, and one million were smart enough to be at the top of that pool to leave. There are people in Pakistan today making tens of thousands of dollars through some skill. If you don’t believe even that, the people who could, left.” The defeatist attitude, he argues, is the one thing the listener controls.

He ends with the numbers Owais had given him earlier in the conversation. Four million more workers heading to Dubai by 2040. Three million caregivers needed in Europe by 2030. “As long as you meet the requirement, there is absolutely no reason you won’t get the opportunity. Stop worrying about society, the world, the family. Worry about yourself. The country will improve on its own.”