Today I met a Turk who is a student immigration advisor. His firm runs ads on Google but has recently stopped advertising in Pakistan. The reason he did that is because their query volume increased by 1000% in the last week. All of their budget was getting consumed by leads that didn’t convert. That happened because a news story surfaced in Pakistan about Pakistan and Turkey looking forward to sign a dual-citizenship agreement.
The news was interpreted in Pakistan with an assumption that all Pakistanis will automatically become Turkish citizens and all Turks will automatically become Pakistani citizens. The news was fueled by all Pakistani newspapers who are responsible for giving that feel to the news. This was further fueled by celebrities such as Hamza Ali Abbasi who called this resurgence of Khilafat movement and further suggested that we should also have one currency like European Union (WTF, Hamza bro?).
The truth is that all of that is baseless. There is indeed a deal between the governments happening, but the deal only means that any individual is now able to keep both citizenships in an event he’s offered one such citizenship through regular means such as by marriage, investment, naturalization (spending time etc), or through any other means that existed before. This agreement is identical to how Pakistanis can keep both Pakistani and American citizenships at the same time. But not all Pakistanis automatically become Americans.
Without this agreement in place, all Pakistanis had to give up their Pakistani citizenship in order to acquire Turkish citizenship and vice versa.
Pakistan already has such deals with many other countries including muslim countries such as Egypt, Syria, Jordan & Bahrain. Pakistan also has this treaty with many western and European countries. A treaty of this kind with Turkey is a step in right direction, but it isn’t what everyone has concluded it to be.