Abstract
The Opportunity Trap centers on the lives of 50 H1B visa holders and how their families fare in the United States. Two pathways are detailed: one led by male tech workers, and another led by female nurses. Banerjee's text outlines the racialized and gendered processes that shape their experiences. First, she compares the gendered occupational logic in nursing and information technology work to examine how feminized care logic and masculinized technological skills facilitate visa procurement and inform how this group distances itself from other non-whites in the United States. Second, the dependent spouse or H4 visa holder, both credentialed professionals, must manage US immigration policy's gendered logic that takes for granted that the trailing spouses have the desire to participate in the formal labor market. On the one hand, the female spouse is reluctantly converted into a housewife with little to no privileges. The male trailing spouse struggles with not being the breadwinner. In each case, the couples are forced to be creative with protecting each other's sense of gendered professional self. The visa regime, “as a technique that controls the lives and subjectivities of immigrant workers and their families” (p. 6), is the core apparatus that couples contend with. The model minority framework was a tool both migrant tech workers and nurses used to regain agency. In short, the text illustrates how heteronormative family logic shapes migration policy and is complicated by the racial project of the skilled migrant labor force.
One hundred twenty-five interviews and over 500 observation hours were completed in the 2000s before Obama signed the 2015 executive order that authorized dependent spouses to work. As a result, these data provide a crucial behind-the-scenes view of how highly skilled immigrants, independent of their credentials, are exploited through the visa regime. The intersectional lens on family, migration, and work is brought to life with a glimpse into the intimate experiences of sitting at a respondent's kitchen table or riding Chicago's El train. Throughout the book, Banerjee showcases her careful feminist methodological lens by naming her privilege and how her two identities—Indian national and US academic—informed her relationship with research participants. The in-depth interviews, intimate engagement, and reflexivity throughout the text are evidence of methodological rigor that provides a text that will be great for any graduate or undergraduate course on migration, family, work, and public policy.
The first two chapters demonstrate how the nuclear family construct creates a cage for both migrant worker and their spouse, where the talents of both are interpreted through a gendered lens. The first summarizes three distinct mechanisms: H1B visa procurement, immigration policy around skilled workers, and the parallel recruitment processes of recruiting male tech workers and Indian female nurses. A vital dimension of family migration policy is to protect the US social safety net from the assumed burden of the dependent spouse. The second chapter details the dependent spouses’ invisibility, the challenges they face interacting in public spaces, and the strain that these new challenges place on immigrants’ marriages.
The three chapters that follow detail the visa regime's impact on family dynamics. Chapter 3 extends the explanatory power of legal liminality (Menjívar 2006). The leading spouses’ relationship with their employer-sponsor must be protected to secure the employer's sponsorship of a green card. Protecting their gendered model minority worker status is a tool used to secure a pathway toward legalization. How couples assign tasks along gendered lines is covered in Chapter 4, where Banerjee explains how, for example, men become the household's financial manager. The last empirical chapter employs a postcolonial and critical feminist lens on how the visa regime informs parenting and introduces the term transcultural cultivation. This parenting style combines US middle-class practices, such as investing in talent-based activities, and Indian cultural values such as communal-oriented upbringing and respecting the extended family unit. Family scholars may expect more data from children, but the text intends to center the adults as workers, spouses, and parents and how they interact with various US bureaucracies. This text is a call to social scientists to design research projects that close the theoretical gaps between various subfields in their disciplines to create policy change.