The Migration-Development Regime: How Class Shapes Indian Emigration

The Migration-Development Regime provides a novel analytical framework to understand the causes and effects of global migration in India, revealing how the Indian state has managed international emigration to forge and legitimize class inequalities. It also shows how poor and elite emigrants have resisted and re-shaped state emigration practices over time, recasting contemporary migration as a dynamic historical process that sends states and migrants have long used to shape local development.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 296 pages
Publication date: 16 December 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc

A comprehensive historical account of India's utilization of its poor and elite emigrants to advance its development, as well as the reactions, resistance, and re-shaping of India's development by Indian emigrants, is presented. The Migration-Development Regime offers a novel analytical framework to explore the causes and consequences of global migration in India, the world's largest emigrant exporter and recipient of remittances. Through an archival analysis of Indian government documents, a comprehensive data base of Indian migrants, transnational organizations, and over 200 interviews with poor and elite Indian emigrants, recruiters, and government officials, this book unveils the significant role played by the Indian state, spanning from the colonial era to the present, in perpetuating and legitimizing class inequalities within India through the management of international emigration. It also highlights the diverse ways in which poor and elite emigrants have resisted and reshaped state emigration practices over time. By adopting a long-term and class-based perspective, this book reimagines contemporary migration as a complex historical process that both sending states and migrants have employed to shape local development. It challenges the conventional understanding of migration as a problematic consequence of neoliberalism or a panacea for development in sending countries. Instead, it exposes the material and ideological impacts of migration on sending state development and identifies what is truly novel about contemporary migration.

Dimension: 235 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780197586402