Bielefeld: Transcript [distributed by Columbia University Press], 2022. 376 pp. (Graphs, figures, B&W photos.) US$60.00, paper. ISBN 9783837662122.
Hannah Uprety’s Becoming a Migrant Worker in Nepal is based on the author’s PhD dissertation at the Faculty of Geosciences, University of Munster, Germany. The book provides nuanced analysis of how governmentality by national and international migration infrastructures makes a person a “labour migrant” even before migration. Using Nepali labour migrants’ journey to the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) member countries and Malaysia as a case study, the book analyzes how inequalities are produced and sustained to the benefit of employers and intermediaries and to the disadvantage of workers in the international labour market.
The first objective of Uprety’s book is to highlight how contemporary labour migration is governed to make Nepali men and women specific types of migrant workers even before they migrate. The second objective is to discuss how modes of governance enable and advance the formation of an international market around Nepali migrant labour and how different migrant intermediaries function to shape migrant workers per the terms of destination labour market regimes.
Methodologically, the book draws on multi-sensory ethnographic research, discourse analysis, and genealogical methods. The book uses quotes, visuals, case stories, advertisements, and other forms of data in an illustrative manner making it easy for readers who are unfamiliar with daily Nepali life and contractual labour migration to understand the author’s points. The data are drawn from a broad range of spaces that aspiring Nepali migrants go through during their migration journey. This includes navigating with local brokers, employer representatives, skill centers, pre-selection and interview classes, pre-departure orientation classes, and formal and informal briefing sessions for migrants. The rules of the game in these spaces have been analyzed and used for a compelling illustration of the Nepali migration regime and its impact on the conversion of Nepali citizens into labour migrants.
Uprety begins by giving context to how she became interested in her research. Among others, she links how the imported idea of development bikas has been used to create migration aspirations. Chapter 2 discusses the conceptual framework of the study. Uprety derives her conceptual framework from a wide range of discourses used in migration, including Foucault’s concept of governmentality and biopolitics and marketization of migrant labour. The author presents her interpretation of the Nepali migration regime using a three-pillar conceptual framework related to the governing of migrants: a) governing through recruitment, b) governing market encounters, and c) governing through instruction.
The first pillar is about how the recruitment process in migration is structured to govern migrants and create migrant candidates who unquestionably submit to the rules of the clients. This is discussed in chapter 4, which explains how labour migration is presented to citizens as a solution and way out of underdevelopment. The chapter highlights how colonialism continues in migration governance and how the imported idea of development is sold as a tool in governing migrants. It also discusses how practices are embodied, including the emotions and technologies used in the governance of migration. For doing so, the author presents a nuanced analysis of the visuality of recruitment, such as the use of advertisements and narratives that are built around the local idea of a successful family man, and that migration is a way to achieve such an ideal. The chapter also importantly highlights how gender norms that take women as immobile migrants and men as mobile migrants are reinforced.
Chapter 4 also discusses the second pillar, which is about the market encounters that govern to integrate Nepali migrant candidates into the international labour market system. The author describes the arrangements of power in migration spaces such as testing and skill centers, including the formal and subversive practices in these spaces, and the use of detachment and pacification in governing market encounters in both Nepal and the migrant destinations. The section further analyzes how the international dynamics of hiring Nepali workers and the processes that singularize Nepali workers in the international labour market force Nepali workers to conform to the very practices that sustain the commodification of labour.
The third pillar discusses the specific instructions that are used throughout the migration process intended to transform Nepali workers’ conduct and subjectivities so they self conform to the requirements of the migration regime. This section shows the politics of skilled and unskilled workers and how rules are bent to serve the interests of the destination. Here Uprety discusses how practices around formal and informal pre-departure orientations and informal advice from recruiters and employers are used to make submissive Nepali workers.
While the book’s focus is on the recruitment industry, it also analyzes other relevant migration infrastructures such as the national and international legal and procedural elements that contribute to the commodification of labour. Discussion of the situation of Nepali migrants vis-à-vis Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi workers who contest in the same spaces in the GCC and Malaysian labour market helps uncover why many subversive practices have become institutionalized. Such a comparison also highlights how stereotyping of Nepali workers as naïve, diligent, and obedient helps sustain hierarchies in the Nepali migration regime and how stereotyping is problematic and works in disfavour of migrants.
The book contributes importantly to a much needed holistic analysis that weaves the local, national, and international functioning of the labour market to create and sustain hierarchies based on ethnicity and nationality, and use these criteria to bend workers to submit, to the benefit of employers and recruitment agencies. It gives critical details of how aspiring migrants are compelled/groomed to conform to these hierarchies as soon as they begin considering foreign employment, and how such governmentality acts both legally and through subversive practices in local, national, and international labour migration regimes.
Anita Ghimire
Nepal Institute for Social and Environmental Research, Bharatpur