The Migration-Development Regime

Abstract

Abstract How can we explain global migration from the perspective of sending states and migrants? The Migration-Development Regime introduces a novel analytical framework to answer this question in India, the world’s largest emigrant exporter and largest remittance-receiving country. Drawing on archives, a new database of transnational migrant organizations, and unique interviews with poor and elite emigrants, recruiters, and government officials, this book exposes how the Indian state, as well as poor and elite emigrants, have long forged and legitimized class inequalities within India through their management of international emigration. Since the 1800s, the Indian state has sometimes forbidden and sometimes promoted emigration. And Indian emigrants have sometimes brought material and sometimes ideological inflows to India. But throughout, the Indian state has differentially used poor and elite emigrants to accelerate domestic economic growth and retain political legitimacy by imposing different regulations, acquiring different benefits, and making different pacts with different classes of emigrants. At the same time, poor and elite emigrants since the 1900s have differentially resisted and reshaped Indian emigration practices and development agendas. By taking this 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 tried to manage. In doing so, it redefines the primary problems of migration, exposes the material and ideological impact that migration has on sending-state development, and isolates what is truly novel about contemporary migration.