Review of “The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program”

Abstract

Pallavi Banerjee’s The Opportunity Trap offers a fascinating window into the intimate relationship between migration visas and the work/family lives of skilled migrants and their spousal dependents. The Opportunity Trap demonstrates the far reach of migration policy into the material and social realities of migrant families as they navigate marriage, parenting, employment, and their sense of self. Banerjee questions the seeming gender and racial neutrality of visa laws by showing how these policies drive deeply gendered and racialized outcomes at home and work. The book brings a nuanced intersectional analysis across race, gender, class, and legal status and offers an important contribution to the literature on women-led skilled migration in the United States. With insightful critiques of how the U.S. visa system fails immigrant families, The Opportunity Trap will be of interest to scholars of migration, gender, work, family, and policy/the state. The book's central argument is that migrant visas form a gendered and racialized immigration system that controls the quotidian experiences of migrants. Banerjee forwards the concept of the “visa regime” as a mechanism of state power that surveils and controls immigrants and their families. Her rich analysis shows how the racialized and gendered logics underlying visas influence migrant labor conditions at work and gendered negotiations with spouses in the household. She paints a vivid portrait of housework and parenting in a context in which migrants’ positions are undermined by their legal, gender, and racial status in the United States. Furthermore, Banerjee shows how visa status shapes migrants' sense of self identity and autonomy within the legally ascribed category of “dependent.” The findings illustrate how migration policy can function as a destabilizing force that puts stress on marriages, finances, and migrants’ emotional wellbeing, demonstrating the need for reform for seemingly “family-friendly” policies framed around family unification.