The Migration-Development Regime: Class and Emigration from India since the 1800s

Rina Agarwala, Johns Hopkins University

How can we explain the causes and effects of global migration from the perspective of sending states and migrants themselves? This paper introduces a novel analytical framework to 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, a new data base of Indian migrants’ transnational organizations, and unique interviews with poor and elite Indian emigrants, recruiters, and government officials, I expose the vital role the Indian state, and its poor and elite emigrants, have played in legitimizing class inequalities within India through their management of international emigration. Since the 1800s, the Indian state has differentially used poor and elite emigrants to accelerate domestic economic growth at the cost of class inequalities, while still retaining political legitimacy. At times, the Indian state has forbidden emigration, at other times it has promoted it. At times, Indian emigrants have brought substantial material inflows, at other times, they have brought new ideas to support new development agendas within India. But throughout, Indian emigration practices have deepened class inequalities by imposing different regulations, acquiring different benefits from different classes of emigrants, and making new class pacts-- while remaining invisible in discussions on Indian development. On the flip side, since the early 1900s, poor and elite emigrants have resisted and re-shaped Indian development in response to state migration practices. By taking this long and class-based view, this book recasts contemporary migration not 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 manage. In doing so, it re-defines 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.

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 Presented in Session 207. Global Connections of Class