(Original cover designed by Santanu Dutta)
Awards:
WINNER, 2023 Asia and Asian America Section Book Award, awarded by the American Sociological Association
Honorable Mention, 2022 Betty and McClung Lee Book Award, given by the Association for Humanist Sociology.
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Dr. Pallavi Banerjee's award-winning monograph is entitled The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program, (New York University Press, 2022).
An overview of the book, in Pallavi's voice: In my forthcoming book, The Opportunity Trap (NYU Press), I build on my dissertation data to comparatively explore the effects of U.S. visa policies on the experiences of Indian professional migrant families that are male-led with those that are female-led. Specifically, I focus on how visa policies intersect with gendered migrations to shape the everyday lives of the migrant families in the private and public spheres. I study families of both male high-tech workers and female nurses who migrate to the United States on skilled workers visas (H1-B), visas that are tied to their employment status in the U.S. The spouses and children of these professional workers migrate on dependent visas (H-4). I argue that while the dependent visa policy uses gender-neutral language, the policy is framed by gendered assumptions that view work and family as two separate and binary spheres: the male provider and the female homemaker/caregiver.
Available online and on the NYU Press site.