Conference Agenda

Do migration–developments regimes (MDRs) function beyond the nation-state? This paper will focus on Agarwala’s concept of the “migration–development regime” (2022) and apply it to the context of mobility and migrant management in imperial contexts. Specifically, this paper will theoretically reflect on the MDR concept when applied to an empire-state rather than a nation-state. By analysing border- and mobility-management practices of the British Empire in colonial India, this paper will aim to expand the concept of migration–development regimes beyond the nation-state. In doing so, it will focus specifically on the financial as well as racialized motivations that shaped the imperial infrastructure of migration control in the subcontinent.

This paper looks at the institutional evolution of emigration governance in India from the nineteenth century to the present. Building from Agarwala’s (2022) MDR framework of emigration governance based on class, I extend it to an analysis of the formation and evolution of emigration institutions through a qualitative study of archival sources. The primary source data is drawn from Indian emigration legislation including the Emigration Acts of 1864 to 1983, as well as the Draft Emigration Bills of 2019 and 2021. I also use secondary sources to emphasize my findings. Analytically, I use a historical-institutionalist framework, hitherto used in the study of immigration policy governance (Tichenor, 2002; Collbern and Ramakrishnan, 2021). I find that legislation and the creation of emigration institutions in the country have roughly followed the migration development regime eras put forward by Agarwala, but in a lagged manner due to political expediency and institutional stickiness based on path dependence. Building on Agarwala, I classify India’s eras of migration governance into: 1) Regulatory; 2) Protectionist; and 3) Management eras, the latter of which is put forward in the Draft Emigration Bills of 2019 and 2021. The first two eras follow a class-based demarcation in emigration governance, as noted by Agarwala, while I argue the proposed management era of governance looks to remove class distinctions while increasing state control of emigration. I find that while emigration governance has followed developmental needs of various Indian states, the governance aspect of it has led to muddled outcomes for the Indian emigrants themselves.

Remittances may be called one of the significant drivers of the migration-development regimes (MDR). Remittances often help the origin countries in coming out of the Low-Income Country (LIC) trap. At times, remittances have even been considered a quantitative measure of brain gain to the home economy, justifiably compensating for the brain drain. Asia being the largest remittance receiving continent in the world with more than half of it flowing to South Asia from the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, the US, UK, Canada, Australia and the European Union, India has been at the world's top position through the MDRs. It received more than US $80 billion remittances in 2019 and crossed $110 billion by 2022. However, the significant dip that India as well as the other leading remittance recipient countries experienced in between, during the COVID-19 years of 2020 and 2021, makes us rethink to warrant for an alternative framework involving contestation of the existing predominant one of "migration and development". Using the World Bank, UN-DESA and Asian Development Bank data on international migration flows in South Asia and remittances to India, either comparative-static as well as longitudinal, the central question the paper aims to project is whether it is time we looked for alternative to the migration-development nexus. While addressing the governance issues relating to the changing migration and remittance management of countries involved and the consequent economic and political challenges, it examines the strengthening "audibility" of what Khadria had elsewhere called the "silent backwash of reverse remittances". The paper uses its findings to discuss the prospective policy recommendations for innovations in multilateral negotiations between the stakeholders comprising the "whole of society" and the "whole of government".