Modern, Historical, and Neutral: Visa-Holding Indian Immigrants Responding to Racialization in the US

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 22. Racialization and reactive ethnicity

Abstract

Elite Indian immigrants, a highly visible racial minority of South Asian origin in the United States, respond to their racialization in two ways. Some scholars find them embracing the model-minority racial stereotype. Others argue that they escape racialization by withdrawing into the diaspora, where they reproduce the sending state’s hegemonic nationalistic discourses. But how do elite Indian immigrants, who hold temporary visas, respond to their racialization? From my interview-based study of Indian immigrant tech workers’ activism in the US, I find them pursuing dual belonging in the nationalist frameworks of both the sending and host states. This claim for dual belonging is important for temporary visa holders, as they are neither fully integrated in the host state, nor fully extricated from the sending state as citizens. I identify three discourses of dual belonging by which Indian immigrant tech workers respond to their racialized status: (1) modernization, (2) historicization, and (3) neutralization. The discourses correspond to the core features of modern neoliberal nation states, and show how immigrants, even as the racialized other, reproduce the hegemonic imaginaries of national identity.

Author

• Rianka Roy, Wake Forest University