Doctoral Dissertation Research: Asian Indian Immigrants in New York and London: A Study of Transnational Labor Migration

The two main objectives of this doctoral dissertation research proposal are as follows: (1) To explore the questions of why, after the early 1960s, highly-skilled professional and technical workers from India have been migrating to New York, while their low-skill counterparts have been migrating to London; and (2) What are the consequences of these different skill-levels of migrants on their relations with their homeland and with the receiving areas? Migrants' relationships to various organizational and interpersonal environments are hypothesized to affect the types and destination of migration, and these environments are expected to vary significantly at both the origin and destination of migration. The proposed research examines this through quantitative demographic data and semi-structured, qualitative interviews from a random sample of first-generation Gujaratis, one of the largest Indian immigrant groups in the New York metropolitan area and Greater London. This cross-national comparison highlights the wide variation in labor migration within the Asian Indian diaspora, and permits us to consider the structural conditions that promote those particular flows of immigrants and how they might change for the future.