Germany Wants to Export Goods to Pakistan. It Also Wants to Expel Pakistanis. It Cannot Do Both.

AfD has a 3.3 billion euro blind spot. Nobody in Berlin mentions it. Nobody in Islamabad is making enough noise about it either.

AI-generated image for illustration purpose only

There is a number missing from every remigration debate in Germany. Not in AfD’s draft programme for Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Not in the Bundestag speeches. Not once in the opinion columns. The number is 3.3 billion euros. Germany and Pakistan, 2023, bilateral trade. That figure makes Germany Pakistan’s single largest trading partner inside the EU.

AfD wants Pakistanis removed. German exporters want Pakistani buyers. Nobody in Berlin has apparently noticed these two things are connected.

The damage is already running, months before September. Pakistani families in Germany are frightened. Not visibly. Quietly. A lawyer’s number saved in a phone. A residency document pulled out and checked again. A question asked between a husband and wife that was not being asked a year ago. Whether Germany is worth staying in. That question, once it gets into a community, does not get answered cleanly. It just sits there.

My family holds German status. I am writing from Karachi. I want to say that now, before the argument, because pretending this is purely analytical would be dishonest.

The people AfD wants to expel are not strangers to Pakistan

German employment data from 2018 put Pakistanis among the most successful non-EU job seekers in the country. Around 100,000 live there now. They send over a billion euros home annually. Engineers. Researchers. Business owners with contacts running in both directions, Karachi and Stuttgart simultaneously.

Force them out and they do not disappear. They come back to Pakistan with twelve years of German inside them. How German firms price. Where they are vulnerable. Which competitor is already in the room. And something else: a reason to stop making introductions on Germany’s behalf.

I genuinely do not know how decisive that effect is. Trade has survived worse. Germany and Turkey endured years of real diplomatic friction and the bilateral numbers barely moved. So maybe I am overstating the diaspora’s commercial weight. Possibly. But nobody in Berlin is even running that calculation, which is its own kind of answer.

What happens when that engineer goes home

Twelve years in Stuttgart. German factory floors. A wedding in Lahore. Children who grew up switching between Urdu at home and German at school. When AfD pushes that man out, he leaves with everything he learned and one addition: a personal reason to stop helping German firms win.

Germany put 3.8 billion euros into Pakistan since 1961. Vocational centres in Sindh. Power infrastructure in Punjab. Real things, built slowly. But the money was not what made German firms the first call in Pakistani boardrooms ahead of French or Chinese competitors. That came from something harder to budget for. The visits. The fellowships. The phone numbers exchanged after a dinner that nobody filed a report about.

Goodwill is not soft. It is the reason a buyer picks up the phone before the tender closes. Lose it and no trade mission gets it back.

AfD has not thought this through

Their framework separates migration from economics entirely. Removing a Pakistani family from Munich sits in the security column. A German engineering contract in Karachi sits somewhere else. The columns do not talk to each other.

Pakistan does not work in columns. Relationships here move ahead of institutions. The German whose face is known in the right corridor, whose firm once did something useful for someone’s nephew, holds commercial value that does not appear on any spreadsheet. Remove enough of those people and German products are suddenly competing on specification and price alone against Chinese alternatives that arrive with financing attached and ask nothing about governance.

Beijing runs the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Not remigration programmes. Procurement officers in Islamabad notice.

It has happened before

France hardened its rhetoric toward North African communities in the early 2010s. Moroccan and Algerian business networks quietly redirected relationships toward Spain and Germany. No announcement. No protest. Tender preferences shifted. Phone calls went elsewhere. France noticed in the data, not in the news, and later than it should have.

Germany spent seventy years building its position as Pakistan’s primary EU trading partner. That is not protected by treaty. The competition is not waiting.

What AfD would say, and where they are not entirely wrong

Trade moves between governments and companies, not communities. German engineering sells on quality, delivery, and reliability, not on whether Pakistanis happen to live in Frankfurt. That is AfD’s answer if pressed and it is not completely false. Industrial capacity is real. Goodwill does not ship a turbine.

Something in my own argument bothers me though. Making the economic case against remigration implies that people who generate less commercial value deserve the policy more. I do not believe that. The human argument against remigration is simpler and more important than anything I have written here. I am making the economic argument because AfD only speaks one language, national interest, competitive advantage, results. On those terms, this policy is self-defeating. Germany would be dismantling its own commercial infrastructure in a three-billion-euro market, quietly, one expelled family at a time.

It will not show in any programme document. It will show in the export figures around 2028, 2029. Without announcement.

By then AfD will have found something else to blame.