Riphah International University

What Pakistan's own immigration authority currently publishes. Not a ranking, not a guarantee, and not the same as what any agent or forum will tell you. Whether someone actually obtains residence depends on occupation, points, funds and policy that can change between application and graduation.

New entry added 19 August 2026. Two Pakistani government domains accepted as a government source here: dgip.gov.pk (Directorate General of Immigration & Passports, which together with interior.gov.pk administers visas) and pakistancode.gov.pk (the Ministry of Law and Justice's own official legal-code portal, hosting the actual current text of the Pakistan Citizenship Act 1951). interior.gov.pk (Ministry of Interior) was tried directly for its own work-visa policy page but returned HTTP 404 on the URL found by search; dgip.gov.pk's own visa-categories page independently states materially the same work-visa mechanics and was used instead. workDuringStudy and postStudyWork are both left null: neither dgip.gov.pk nor any other Pakistani government page found states a specific work-while-studying entitlement attached to the Study Visa, or a distinct post-study/graduate job-search status separate from the ordinary employer-sponsored Work Visa — the visa-category structure (Study and Work kept as separate, non-overlapping categories) suggests none is published, but StudyPath records that as an absence of evidence rather than asserting a confirmed 'no' either way. Collection note: the Pakistan Citizenship Act PDF (pakistancode.gov.pk) returned raw binary bytes to automated fetching; it was downloaded and converted with pdftotext (poppler-utils, -enc UTF-8 -layout) and archived from a browser capture, the pattern already used elsewhere on StudyPath for PDF-only government sources. The Act's own Schedule contains only the oath of allegiance, not a naturalisation-qualifications schedule — the residence-length and language criteria commonly quoted in secondary sources appear to live in the separate Pakistan Citizenship Rules, 1952 (subordinate legislation), which StudyPath could not locate hosted on an official.gov.pk domain; a future collector should retry finding those Rules on pakistancode.gov.pk or a provincial law portal before asserting a specific residence-year figure for Pakistan. naturalisationStatus set to 'published-route': Section 9 and its proviso, however thin, are real statutory text a foreign resident could in principle be registered under — per the doc comment on ResidencyPathway.naturalisationStatus this field records only whether something is published, not how detailed or predictable the criteria are, and Pakistan's own Act is genuinely unusual on StudyPath for leaving naturalisation almost entirely to government discretion rather than spelling out a numbered qualifying test. citizenshipTerms records minimumResidenceYears null because Section 9 of the Pakistan Citizenship Act 1951 sets no residence-year figure, and the subordinate Pakistan Citizenship Rules that are commonly cited for a 5-year figure could not be located on an official Pakistani government domain. dualCitizenshipAllowed is false because that is the Act’s own default, stated in Section 14’s heading and Section 14(1); Section 14(3) exempts citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies and of any other country the Federal Government notifies in the official Gazette, so for an applicant whose country is on that notified list the answer is the opposite — see citizenshipRoute.