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In
The Migration-Development Regime, Rina Agarwala seeks to understand how international migration is affecting sending countries and migrants themselves. Specifically, she examines the case of India, the world's largest emigrant exporter and the world's largest remittance receiver. Rather than seeing emigration as simply a neoliberal disaster or a panacea for globalization, this book shows how the Indian state has long used and controlled its poor and elite emigrants differently to further Indian development, and how Indian emigrants have differentially reacted to state practices over time. These findings help Agarwala expose what is truly novel about India's contemporary emigration practices, which have deepened class inequalities within India more than ever before.
List of contents
- Chapter 1: Introduction
- Chapter 2: Migration-Development Regimes (MDRs)
- Chapter 3: The Rise and Fall of the Coolie MDR (1834-1947): Racialized Class Exploitation
- Chapter 4: The Rise and Fall of the Nationalist MDR (1947-1977): Erasing the Indian Emigrant
- Chapter 5: The CEO MDR (1977-present): Liberalizing Emigration and Tapping Emigrants' Financial Contributions
- Chapter 6: The CEO MDR: Tapping Elite Emigrants' Ideological Contributions and Forging an Elite Class Pact of "Global Indians"
- Chapter 7: Experiencing the CEO MDR From Below: Poor Emigrants
- Chapter 8: Experiencing the CEO MDR from Below: Elite Emigrants
- Chapter 9: Vulnerabilities in the CEO MDR and a Future Trajectory
- References
- Index
About the author
Rina Agarwala is Associate Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Agarwala is the award-winning author of Informal Labor, Formal Politics and Dignified Discontent in India (2013) and coeditor of Whatever Happened to Class? Reflections from South Asia (2016).
Summary
A sweeping history of how India has used its poor and elite emigrants to further Indian development and how Indian emigrants have reacted, resisted, and re-shaped India's development in response.
How can states and migrants themselves explain the causes and effects of global migration? The Migration-Development Regime introduces a novel analytical framework to help answer this question in India, the world's largest emigrant exporter and the world's largest remittance-receiving country. Drawing on an archival analysis of Indian government documents, an original data base of Indian migrants' transnational organizations, and over 200 interviews with poor and elite Indian emigrants, recruiters, and government officials, this book exposes the vital role the Indian state (from the colonial era to the present day) has long played in forging and legitimizing class inequalities within India through the management of international emigration. It also exposes how poor and elite emigrants have differentially resisted and re-shaped state emigration practices over time. By taking a long and class-based view, this book recasts contemporary migration not simply as a problematic function of neoliberalism or as a development panacea for sending countries, but as a dynamic historical process that sending states and migrants have long used to shape local development. In doing so, it re-defines the primary problems of global migration, exposes the material and ideological impact that migration has on sending state development, and isolates what is truly novel about contemporary migration.
Additional text
For more than a century, India has sent migrants abroad to work; today, remittances from overseas workers make up one of the country's largest sources of foreign exchange. Yet, as Rina Agarwala points out in her remarkable new work, discussions of India's economic growth rarely acknowledge migrants' contributions, nor do they explore the way national and state policies continue to shape migrants' options, from Silicon Valley's highly-educated computer scientists, to construction workers packed into migrant hostels in the Middle East. Agarwala's carefully-researched, insightful analysis will change the way we think about India's diaspora, provoke new questions about how sending countries could protect workers abroad, and ensure their communities benefit from the 'development' that the migrants are supporting.
