The Pallavi Banerjee Book Talk has been cancelled. We appreciate your interest and will provide updates if this event is rescheduled. Thank you again for your interest in this event.
The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program.
This event is co-sponsored by the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department and The Center for South Asian Studies.
This book talk 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 U.S. for work. Drawing on extensive qualitative data from in-depth interviews, observations, and archival research, Banerjee compares 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. She 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 U.S. 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 U.S., constrain and fracture individuals and their families, leading many to refer to the dependent visas as “vegetable visas” and “prison visas.” Visa policies that are framed as legally gender- and race-neutral, in fact, have gendered and racialized ramifications for visa holders and their spouses. Banerjee shows how her research participants struggle to negotiate their lives within a visa regime embedded in a gendered and racialized system of oppression.
Pallavi Banerjee is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and a Research Excellence Chair at the University of Calgary. She directs the Critical Gender, Intersectionality and Migration Research Group at the University of Calgary. Her research is situated at the intersections of immigration, gender, families, unpaid and paid labour, intersectionality, and transnationalism. She is the author of the award-winning book The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families and the Failures of Dependent-Visa Policy. Her other award-winning research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the American Behavioral Scientist, Gender & Society, Contexts, Canadian Ethnic Studies, Sociological Forum, Gender, Work and Organization, Women, Gender and Families of Color. She has also written opinion pieces in venues such as The Globe and Mail and Ms Magazine.