Model Migrants and Ideal Workers

Chapter 2 analyzes the narratives of the participants specific to H-4 dependent visas and argues that the visa laws levy penalties on the public interactions and private selfhood of visa holders. Two major themes explored in this chapter are the “invisibility” and “devaluation” that dependent visa holders experience as individuals and in their public interactions. Building on the concept of governmentality of the visa regime, the author contends that the effectiveness of global labor migration is predicated on the seamless disciplining of individuals to become model migrants and ideal workers. The underlying coercive power of the state dictates this disciplining of the self. As individuals negotiate a new identity as dependent spouses, the mechanisms through which dependence is created and sustained eventually renders the structures of the oppressive visa regime invisible. The dependent women tended to readjust their selves to conform within the structure, training themselves to live with trauma and alienation, while the dependent men resigned themselves to humiliation but refused to talk about it for fear of acknowledging the emasculation they experienced. And yet, both men and women on dependent visas resisted becoming the “vegetables” that the visas seemed to require them to be.