Why Pakistan and Bangladesh Were Hit by the U.S. Visa Freeze While India Was Not
The United States’ decision to freeze immigrant visa processing for citizens of 75 countries has triggered predictable outrage, denial, and conspiracy theories across South Asia. But stripped of emotion and online noise, the policy outcome itself tells a far more uncomfortable truth. Pakistan and Bangladesh are on the list. India is not. And this difference has nothing to do with who praised Washington more enthusiastically or who stayed silent. It has everything to do with how nations are assessed beyond political optics.
The sequence of events makes the contrast sharper. As the visa freeze was being prepared, Shehbaz Sharif and Asim Munir publicly floated the idea of recommending Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize. Around the same time, Muhammad Yunus was seen making deliberate attempts to woo Trump and signal alignment. In contrast, Narendra Modi did not indulge in public flattery, symbolic praise, or performative outreach. The result was politically inconvenient for Islamabad and Dhaka but revealing nonetheless. Both Pakistan and Bangladesh were included in the visa freeze. India was unaffected.
This immediately punctures a popular myth, especially among online troll ecosystems in Pakistan and Bangladesh, that diplomacy is a personality contest. Immigration policy in the United States does not operate on compliments, Nobel lobbying, or viral optics. It operates on institutional assessments, compliance data, migration outcomes, and long-term risk analysis. Leaders can praise all they want, but bureaucracies decide based on numbers, not noise.
The visa freeze targets immigrant visas, not tourism or short-term travel. That distinction matters. Immigrant visas are evaluated through lenses such as public charge risk, employment prospects, overstay history, enforcement cooperation, and integration outcomes. On these metrics, Pakistan has carried long-standing red flags. Chronic economic instability, weak job absorption capacity, migration compliance issues, and governance deficits have shaped how Pakistani migrants are assessed. No amount of rhetorical goodwill can erase those structural realities.
Bangladesh’s case is more nuanced but no less instructive. Despite notable economic progress, Bangladesh continues to be viewed primarily as a low-income migration source with heavy dependence on remittances. Concerns around workforce transition, social mobility, and long-term self-sufficiency persist in destination-country assessments. Outreach to foreign leaders does not override these perceptions when visa policy is being framed.
India, on the other hand, falls into an entirely different category. Indian migration to the United States is dominated by skilled labour, education-linked mobility, entrepreneurship, and a proven record of economic contribution. Over decades, Indian citizens have built credibility through performance, not politics. Compliance history, institutional depth, workforce quality, and diaspora outcomes have collectively insulated India from blanket policy actions like this visa freeze. That insulation exists independent of who occupies New Delhi or whether phone calls are exchanged.
This episode exposes the limits of leader-centric diplomacy. Praise politics may play well on domestic television screens and social media timelines, but it collapses when confronted with institutional scrutiny. Immigration systems do not reward flattery. They reward predictability, contribution, and trust built over time by people, not speeches.
For the internet trolls in Pakistan and Bangladesh who equate national pride with leader worship, this should be a sobering moment. Nations are not judged by how loudly their leaders applaud foreign power. They are judged by what their people contribute, how their institutions function, and whether their societies produce stability rather than risk.
The lesson here is uncomfortable but necessary. Real diplomacy is not performative. It is structural. Until Pakistan and Bangladesh invest in their people, governance, education systems, and institutional credibility, symbolic gestures will continue to fail. And until online discourse in those countries accepts this reality, the cycle of outrage and denial will repeat with every hard policy decision.
India’s exemption is not a reward for silence or strategy. It is the cumulative result of decades of people-driven credibility. That, more than any Nobel recommendation or outreach campaign, is how nations earn their place in the global order.
