Abstract
Rina Agarwala’s book The Migration-Development Regime is a meticulously done, thorough, and detailed study of emigration as a migration-development nexus using India as a case study. Agarwala reintroduces class at the center of a socio-historical analysis of India as an emigration state to understand the relationship between the sending state to its various classes of emigrants.
Agarwala’s methodology deserves special mention. It is rigorous and extensive. She conducts an exhaustive long-form socio-historical analysis that includes archival research of India’s emigration practices from 1834 to the present and in-depth interviews with approximately 200 poor and elite emigrants (categorized as low-skilled and high-skilled, respectively, in Indian emigration parlance). The poor emigrants were concentrated in the Gulf and the elite emigrants were mainly in the United States and the United Kingdom. In Agarwala’s research, these emigrants were represented through migrant organizations in India and the United States. To analyze this massive expanse of data, Agarwala developed a migration-development regime (MDR) framework that she defines as “the full set of emigration practices and policies that (among other forces) enable sending countries to ensure domestic capital accumulation as well as their own political legitimacy at the global and domestic levels” (p. 40). Through this analytical framework, Agarwala sheds light on a largely invisible discursive phenomenon—that the Indian state has historically and contemporaneously deployed class-based emigration policies and regulations on emigrants to extract specific economic and political benefits from diverse classes of emigrants that have exacerbated class (and perhaps caste) inequalities.
Agarwala uses the MDR framework to also carve out three periods in Indian emigration history to interrogate the emigration practices in those periods, which, in and of itself, is a massive feat given the span and the complexities these historical periods present analytically. She calls these historical chunks the Coolie MDR (1934–1947), the Nationalist MDR (1947–1977), and the CEO MDR (1977–present). These periods make up the book’s empirical chapters, the last of which is peppered with the many interviews the author conducted. Through the lens of MDR in her substantive chapters, Agarwala explores how the Indian state has enacted class-based regulations despite the cost to its development agenda. She also shows how state practices have shifted across the time span and if emigrants and these practices have changed India’s economic development agenda at various historical moments.
Seemingly, the book is an intense exploration in unraveling the linkages between emigration and development using India as a case study. But a finer-grained appraisal of two key interventions Agarwala made in conceptualizing the book puts labor at the center of her analysis framed in the language of class. The two interventions are the MDR framework and her decision to use organizations as her unit of analysis for emigrants rather than individual emigrants as a way to capture emigrants’ interactions with the Indian state and their expressions of migrant identities. The rest of this essay will explore how these interventions make labor and migration a core part of the MDR in each phase of emigration.
In her exploration of the Coolie MDR, Agarwala through her rich archival database argues that emigration in India is not a recent occurrence but has historical roots that are racist, imperial, and classist. She also highlights how labor of both poor and elite migrants was used to benefit the colonial, imperialist developmental agenda. The success of the Coolie MDR depended on the variousness in laboring and some non-laboring categories—the poor indentured labor from India used by the British colonial project as plantation workers in other British colonies; the unindentured kangnis/maistries emigrants who helped build the empire’s export-oriented production systems in other colonies through which some of them gained middle-class status; and non-laboring coolies of the British Empire who oversaw the poor Indian laborers in the other colonies and served the logistical and administrative needs of the plantation owners. The strategic use of these various laboring and non-laboring categories solidified the United Kingdom’s economic accumulation in the colonies and the empire while instituting the regulatory framework of emigration, parts of which have sustained over the MDR periodicities. The colonial state had distinct policies for each class of emigrants. For instance, the middle-class emigrants were subjected to less scrutiny and regulations, thereby cementing a class-based racial division of labor. While regulations instituted for the various class categories of labor emigrants sustained in the subsequent postcolonial era of the Indian emigration state, the Coolie MDR era also saw the first labor movement in coalition with the Indian freedom struggle against indentured worker migration leading to the abolition of indentured emigration and the eventual demise of the Coolie MDR. The analysis of the Coolie MDR stands as an important intervention in the international migration literature because it flips the lens on the immigration policies of the Global Northern countries by using an emigration perspective to critique the global migration-labor regime that historically reproduced class-based inequality. We see ramifications of this in the present-day emigration of high-skilled workers to the Global North who are perhaps the present-day elite coolies (see Banerjee, Pallavi, The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program, 2022, reviewed within this Forum).
In her exposition of the Nationalist MDR, Agarwala invokes the labor-migration continuum by uncovering postcolonial India’s commitment to regulating its labor emigration based on class. She shows how the newly independent India instituted a new emigration policy that reflected the Coolie MDR while also forbidding its poor from emigrating for work under the guise of protecting its vulnerable workers, which Agarwala argues was a paternalistic move. The elite were still allowed to emigrate, thereby breaking down the across-class transnational labor solidarity that had been forged in the Coolie MDR. However, the Nationalist MDR eventually failed as both the poor workers in India and elite emigrants were mobilized separately to resist the architects of the MDR.
In the last four chapters, Agarwala takes her readers through an exposé of the CEO-MDR, deepening the analysis on how the emigration state controls migration and labor that is both embedded in a neoliberal logic of emigration and that draws from the earlier historical processes. Agarwala shows that in the contemporary time frame, liberalization of the emigration policies that resulted from demands by poor emigrant workers has led the state to elicit remittances from emigrants as a development strategy. At the same time, the Indian state valorized its poor emigrants by claiming that India was a “development donor”—Indian workers, particularly in the Gulf, being the main labor resource for development—a reminder of Anna Romina Guevarra’s 2009 book (Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers) that shows the construction of the great Filipino worker by Philippines’s emigration regime. Agarwala contends that “this new frame was significant in that it articulated poor Indian emigrants as a form of national currency that could boost India’s global image as a facilitator of third world solidarity, and South-South migration as a form of multilateral cooperation” (p. 114). The poor emigrant workers also became a main source of social and economic remittances but went unacknowledged by the state. The Indian elite emigrants, by contrast, were ideologically constructed as the heroes of Indian development even though their material contribution to Indian development was nominal, undermining poor emigrants’ material and social contributions. At the same time, the current Indian state ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party obfuscated class distinctions between the emigrants by homogenizing the category of the Indian emigrant in pushing ideals of “self-sufficiency” and less governmental interference, constructing the category of “migrant entrepreneurs,” and turning a blind eye to the labor exploitation faced by poor emigrants. Agarwala ends the book by presenting evidence of how the elite emigrant organizations in the United States adhere to the neoliberal ideals of the CEO-MDR and poor emigrant organizations in India demand welfare programs for returnees citing electoral clout. Both practices weaken the possibilities of labor resistance within the CEO-MDR.
This comprehensive study by Agarwala of India’s emigration MDR is both enlightening and troubling as it shows how a postcolonial state transitions through changing MDR in the service of reproducing class inequities globally. The work also destabilizes the large corpus of work on international migration by shifting focus to emigration in a way that is hard to ignore given the rigor of the research. A few questions emerge from this work, however, that may be addressed in future work. How might caste and gender intersect with class to create a different analysis of labor-emigrants that will reframe how we understand MDR? Or, how the distinction made by Jonathan Parry (see Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town, 2020, reviewed within this Forum) between kaam/work and job as class-driven conceptualization of work in India may feature not only across classes but within each class category of emigrants among Agarwala’s participants? I am also left wondering how Hindutva, as another pillar of MDR, may channel the class–labor–migration conundrum?