The Migration-Development Regime

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.