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1. Paper Title: The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in India
Presenter: Sam Asher, World Bank
Estimating intergenerational mobility in developing countries is difficult because matched parent-child income records are rarely available and education is measured very coarsely. In particular, there are no established methods for comparing educational mobility for subsamples of the population when the education distribution is changing over time. We resolve these problems using new methods in partial identification and new administrative data, and study intergenerational mobility across groups and across space in India. Intergenerational mobility for the population as a whole has remained constant since liberalization, but cross-group changes have been substantial. Rising mobility among historically marginalized Scheduled Castes is almost exactly offset by declining intergenerational mobility among Muslims, a comparably sized group that has few constitutional protections. We next explore heterogeneity across space, generating the first high resolution geographic measures of intergenerational mobility across India, with results across 5000 rural sub districts and 20,000 urban neighbourhoods. On average, children are most successful at exiting the bottom of the distribution in places that are urban, southern, and have higher average education levels.
2. Paper Title: Unity in Diversity? How Intergroup Contact Can Foster Nation Building
Presenter: Samuel Bazzi, Boston University
Throughout history, many governments have introduced policies to unite diverse groups through a shared sense of national identity. However, intergroup relationships at the local level are often slow to develop and confounded by spatial sorting and segregation. We shed new light on the long-run process of nation building using one of history’s largest resettlement programs. Between 1979 and 1988, the Transmigration program in Indonesia relocated two million voluntary migrants from the Inner Islands of Java and Bali to the Outer Islands, in an effort to integrate geographically segregated ethnic groups. Migrants could not choose their destinations, and the unprecedented scale of the program created hundreds of new communities with varying degrees of diversity. We exploit this policy-induced variation to identify how diversity shapes incentives to integrate more than a decade after resettlement. Using rich data on language use at home, marriage, and identity choices, we find stronger integration in diverse communities. To understand why changes in diversity did not lead to social anomie or conflict, we identify mechanisms that influence intergroup relationships, including residential segregation, cultural distance, and perceived economic and political competition from migrants. Overall, our findings contribute lessons for the design of resettlement policies and provide a unique lens into the intergenerational process of integration and nation building.
3. Paper Title: Household effects of temporary low-skill work visas: Evidence from the India-Gulf corridor
Presenter: Michael A. Clemens, Center for Global Development and IZA
What are the effects of temporary labor in Gulf states on workers from South Asia and their families? It is insufficient to estimate these effects by comparing households with and without migrants, because those households can differ in countless other ways. Here I measure the effects of migrant work in the United Arab Emirates on workers from India and their families, using a natural experiment. The 2008 crisis in the UAE construction sector resulted in large changes in the ability of Indian households to access UAE jobs, independently of those households’ individual characteristics. I have exceptionally rich data on these workers: a purpose-built survey of Indian households, individually matched to thousands of applicants to UAE jobs and administrative records on workers in the UAE. I estimate the effects of UAE work on Indians’ employment, investment, and indebtedness.
4. Paper Title: Negotiating Networks of Mobility: Muslim Migration to East Pakistan and the Exercise of Agency
Presenter: Isha Dubey, Aarhus University
To a large extent the gap that still remains to be comprehensively filled within the extant scholarship on the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent in 1947 essentially concerns the question of agency explaining why ordinary people behaved in the way they did. This ‘missing middle’ is the piece of the historiographical puzzle that will help us to understand better, not only the nature of the violence that ‘accompanied’ partition but also the chain of events and migrations it set in motion. The way forward, according to Samaddar, is to problematize the tendency to generalize the ‘… immigrant as the abnormal figure of our time …’ that results in the creation of the binary of exceptionality and banality. Following from this basic premise, this paper seeks to understand the nature of the migration of the Muslim population from Bihar in the wake of communal violence in the province in 1946 as an exercise in blurring the boundaries between ‘exceptional’ and ‘ordinary’ motivations for migrations with regard to categorizing mobility. I shall begin with tracing the linkages that existed historically between Bihar and Bengal (which along with Orissa was one big province till 1912) and the networks of work, livelihood and education that they were manifested in. This will be followed by looking at how the question of migration and exodus was addressed and discussed in the public and political space in the province and how the choice came to be associated with being pro Pakistan or a nationalist Muslim. Finally, the continuity of the migration networks between Bihar and the two Pakistans but particularly what was East Pakistan and the narratives of movement across the borders shall be taken up to put forth the argument that even though the drivers of forced migration are seen to be more immediate, these migrations often exhibit forward and backward linkages that shape and influence how, why and when people move.
5. Paper Title: Negotiating and Preserving Liminality: Voting Rights and Tibetan Exiles in India
Presenter: Sonika Gupta, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
This paper examines the location and production of liminality with regard to voting rights of Tibetan exile community in India. Liminality, an anthropological concept, is related here to the legal and bureaucratic ‘inbetweenness’ that characterizes and orders the life of the Tibetan exiles in India. The paper explores the exiled Tibetans as political subjects and focuses on the bureaucratic
accommodations of the Indian state and the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) with regard to the right to vote that exacerbate the liminal existence in exile. The paper also argues that these voting rights are simultaneously contested and embraced by the exile community. Specific responses to the issue of voting rights are produced by the interaction between (a) lived experience of refugeehood and (b) complex constructions of cultural, political and legal identity. Both these factors are fundamentally informed by the liminal space that the exile community inhabits in India.
6. Paper Title: The IT Boom and Other Unintended Consequences of Chasing the American Dream
Presenter: Gaurav Khanna, University of California, San Diego
We study how US immigration policy coupled with the Internet boom affected not just the US economy, but also led to a tech boom in India. Indian students enrolled in engineering schools to gain employment in the rapidly growing US IT industry via the H-1B visa program. Those who could not join the US workforce, due to the H-1B cap, remained in India, enabling the growth of an Indian IT sector. Those who returned with acquired human capital and technology after the expiration of their H-1Bs also contributed to the growing tech-workforce in India. The increase in IT sector productivity allowed India to eventually surpass the US in software exports. Our general equilibrium model captures firm-hiring across various occupations, innovation and technology diffusion, and dynamic worker decisions to choose occupations and fields of major in both the US and India. Supported by a rich descriptive analysis of the changes in the 1990s and 2000s, we match data moments and show that our model captures levels and trends of key variables in validation tests. We perform counterfactual exercises and find that on average, workers in each country are better off because of high-skill migration. The H-1B program induced Indians to switch to computer science (CS) occupations, increasing the CS workforce in India and raising overall IT output in India by 5%. It also induced US workers to switch to non-CS occupations, reducing the US native CS workforce by 9%.
7. Paper Title: Mapping the Middle: Migration and Brokerage at the Borders of the State
Presenter: Natasha Raheja, Cornell University
Nearly 2,000 Pakistani Hindu nationals migrate across the India-Pakistan border each year and settle in Rajasthan where many of them have ethnolinguistic and familial ties. The Foreigners’ Registration Office (FRO) in India has complex visa and immigration rules for Pakistani citizens, making it difficult for Pakistani Hindus to navigate regulations on their own. At the central policy level, the Indian government welcomes Pakistani Hindus to migrate to India with special visas and residence permits, yet local authorities greet them with bureaucratic challenges such as the demand for documents in languages that many of them cannot read and the need to find reliable Indian sponsors.In this context, computer typists, who complete visa and residency forms, among other intermediary service providers, assume an important role as migration brokers. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with FRO officers and migration brokers in Rajasthan, this paper examines what the integral role of middlemen in brokering interactions between migrants and lower-level bureaucrats reveals about the permeability of the state. The paper develops the concept of state permeability as part of an argument that migration brokers embody the blurriness of where the state ends and begins. Through the concept of permeability, I seek to convey how the state is permeable in two senses: 1) the ways in which the borders of the state are porous and 2) how these borders shift through exchanges between state and non-state actors.
Alongside, I demonstrate that although computer typists offer brokerage services that help migrants, the interests of these groups are often not aligned when it comes to shifts in state immigration policy. For example, the Indian Bureau of Immigration recently extended the length of visa extensions granted to Pakistani Hindu migrants from two years to five years, meaning less frequent renewals. “But more renewals are better for us,” one typist griped to me, explaining that this new rule meant less frequent paperwork and thus less income for him. At the same time, the Bureau’s transition to digital payments and online document submission has meant greater reliance on typists for migrants who may not have computer literacy, Internet access, or bank accounts. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with a network of typists who specialize in Pakistani visa and immigration services, I show how facilitative mechanisms may end up creating barriers for migrants while creating opportunities for intermediaries.
8. Paper Title: Technologies of Migration: Passports, Citizenship and the post-Colonial Indian State
Presenter: Haimanti Roy, University of Dayton, Ohio
In the era of globalization and increased mobility, government issued documents with photographs, such as passports, driver’s licenses, PAN cards (in the case of India) are ubiquitous travel companions. Documentary identification not only verify and prove identity but seek to guarantee ‘safety’ and allow only those deemed ‘legal’ entry within a state’s borders. However, such travel documents have, I suggest, become significant artefacts that advance claims of citizenship, and promise inclusion to their possessors. In this paper I focus on the emergence of the post-colonial Indian passport designed specifically to regulate the post-partition forced migrations and the ways in which it became central to mark nationality not only for Partition migrants but also regular travellers seeking to exit and enter India’s territories. This talk unpacks this historical transformation of paper citizenship in the context of mid-twentieth century India and seeks to compare and contrast ongoing issues of documentary citizenship in the United States.
9. Paper Title: The Industrious City: Claiming the City through ‘being Surti’
Presenter: Nishpriha Thakur, Shiv Nadar University, India
After the commercial revolution of Gujarat in the 16th and 17th Centuries, a large number of trading towns developed in the coastal regions of Gujarat, in which Broach (Bharuch), Cambay and Surat were the largest. These individual towns or small capitals developed further in the eighteenth century after the disintegration of the Mughal Empire. The economy of these towns flourished primarily because of industries and artisanal labor and the early industrial labor was drawn mainly from the urban artisans and servant castes (Shah, 1988). These communities were mainly dependent on networks of kinshipand the division of workplace and a house had a vague boundary - especially in the early twentieth century to avoid the Factory laws (Haynes, 1999, 2001). In this way, the relations of productions in the family itself, were also dependent on the networks it created in the extended family. With the boom in textile industry post 1960’s, there was a heavy influx of migrants from various parts of the country. Yet, Surtis and their ways of life did not alter much (as they claim) and again, who is to be called as a Surti. After late 1990’s, the powerloom machines had to be moved out as an administrative measure and the inner city area which flourished mainly on the artisanal economy, gradually transformed into a marketplace with retail commodities. This shift in the dynamics in the relations of production did alter the hold of the communities over the textile and zari industries, losing out to the migrant communities who entered the market in late 1980’s. Thereby, the communities considering themselves as Surtis gradually changed their perceptions about who is a kin. Mainly looking at three castes, Khatri, Gola and Ghanchi, I try to understand how they create ‘kinship terms’ like Mama/Fai in order to negotiate in trade and belongingness to Surat.Through ethnographic accounts spanning over a period of four years, I argue on two registers-1) For cities like Surat where the economy is set mainly through settling of migrant artisans from various parts of the city cannot be called as an industrial city because the character of the city is more or less like that of an artisanal city and 2) how do migrants form their claim to the city based on temporality and on the structures artisanal networks create within and along themselves.