In a dusty corner of the Afghan capital, stinking of sewage and crammed with makeshift dwellings, families arrive every day in cargo trucks that dump their possessions in a heap. They are among 82,000 unregistered Afghan refugees who have been pushed out of neighboring Pakistan since January — along with about 150,000 workers deported from Iran over the same period — and many have come home to nothing.
“Life was hard in Pakistan, but it was a life. Here we don’t know anyone, and there is no work,” said Shomaila Malik, 45, who arrived in March. Her husband, a laborer, is disabled by kidney disease, and their two young sons scavenge all day for scrap metal to buy food. “They should be in school, but we must depend on them finding Pepsi cans,” Malik said. “If we could afford to go back to Pakistan tomorrow, we would.”
At the other end of the city, hundreds of glum, anxious men start lining up after midnight outside the government passport office, clutching documents in plastic folders. By 7 each morning, when the agency opens, the line of passport applicants has grown to more than 1,000. Many are unemployed and say they are determined to leave the country to find a job, any job, in whatever country they can reach.
“I never expected to leave my country, but the situation is getting worse day by day,” said Sahel Sakhzada, 26, whose small cellphone shop went out of business recently. A dozen other men, some in patched and stained work clothes, nodded in agreement. “Everyone in this line is in the same position,” Sakhzada said. “There is no security, no investment, no future here now. The only hope is to leave.”
Both sides of this human tide — the influx of needy returnees with nowhere to turn and the surge of passport applicants hoping for a way out — are symptoms of Afghanistan’s economic stagnation and overwhelmed government, which have left millions of people to fend for themselves at a time of deepening uncertainty.
Besieged by insurgent attacks, crippled by corruption and shocked by the end of a vast international war effort and its accompanying development boom, the year-old administration of President Ashraf Ghani is struggling against terrible odds to keep the country afloat. The official unemployment rate is about 35 percent — four times as high as it was in 2013 — and economists here say it is closer to 50 percent when the large numbers of underemployed are added.
The phenomenon is visible across the capital, where tens of thousands of men gather each morning at intersections, bus stops and bridges, hoping for a day’s work. As the formal economy shrinks, men who had steady sales or office jobs have been reduced to waiting on the corners with bundles of tools, competing with the chronically unemployed for a stint building walls or digging ditches.
“Two years ago, everything was going well. Now it has been two months and four days since I found any work,” said a well-dressed former government accountant named Nehmatullah as he stood beside his bicycle on a corner in west Kabul, a sack of masonry tools on the seat. “I have six children, and I can no longer support them. Since the new government came, security has deteriorated and jobs have vanished. I am angry at the government, I am angry at everything, and I don’t know what to do.”
Nehmatullah’s tenuous perch in the informal economy is only a few blocks from the controlled chaos of the passport office, where men like him are contemplating more desperate leaps into the unknown. The surrounding blocks are crammed with food stalls and sidewalk photocopiers, and police constantly prod and bark at the slow-moving lines of applicants.
According to officials at the Interior Ministry, which runs the agency, every day more than 5,000 people visit the office and about 2,000 receive new passports, the most that can be produced daily. Part of the reason for the crush is the government’s decision last year to annul all old, handwritten passports and require all potential travelers to obtain new computerized ones. So far, about 500,000 new passports have been issued.
original source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/jobless-afghans-flow-in-and-out-of-the-country-in-search-of-a-stable-life/2015/08/17/fbea873c-3c3c-11e5-a312-1a6452ac77d2_story.html