Elite Emigrant Organizations

Abstract

AbstractChapter 8 analyzes the strategies and demands of elite emigrants’ transnational organizations with a focus on the United States. Indian American transnational organizations overwhelmingly embrace, rather than critique, the CEO MDR’s development ideals of privatization, voluntarism, and self-sufficiency. In fact, they helped create the MDR by enthusiastically participating in the national government’s call for their social remittances. To channel these social remittances, Indian Americans have built hundreds of transnational diaspora organizations throughout the United States that promote private education, private philanthropy for poverty alleviation, and private business development. Almost none address social inequities based on class, caste, or gender. Although diverse, these organizations reflect exactly the portrait of the elite global Indian that the CEO MDR celebrates in India (a portrait that, in fact, masks the community’s more layered heterogeneity). Doing so valorizes and uplifts Indian Americans’ own experiences and skills, thereby increasing their status within the United States and India. As well, Indian Americans’ group efforts have empowered them to help shape India’s development and build domestic consent for these ideals within India.