The Opportunity Trap

The Opportunity Trap explores how Indian immigrants grapple with the liminality of their positions as temporary workers or nonworking spouses as well as aspiring citizens after they migrate with their families to the United States for work. Drawing on extensive qualitative data from in-depth interviews, observations, and archival research, this is the first book to compare the work and family lives of two distinct groups of Indian immigrants: men tech workers and women nurses relocating with their spouses, who arrive on H-4 dependent visas. Banerjee unravels the dissonance between the state’s perception of these migrants as internationally mobile skilled workers and the immigrant subjects’ tribulations when negotiating the contradictory expectations of being ideal citizens/workers/families without having the security of permanence in the United States. She also shows how restrictions on the spouses of migrant temporary workers, who are not allowed to work for pay as a condition of their dependent visas in the United States, constrain and fracture individuals and their families, leading many to refer to the dependent visas as “vegetable visas” and “prison visas.” The Opportunity Trap reveals how visa policies strip women and men of basic rights within the home, at the workplace, and in civil society by creating gendered and racialized structures of state-imposed dependence comprising the state, work organizations, and transnational global processes, all shaping the lives of migrant workers and their families. Visa policies that are framed as legally gender- and race-neutral in fact have gendered and racialized ramifications for visa holders and their spouses. This book shows how those whose worlds are tied to these visas struggle to negotiate their lives within a visa regime embedded in a gendered and racialized system of oppression.