Tracing the Evolution of India’s Emigration Governance Institutions: Legal-Institutionalist Stickiness in Post-Colonial Contexts

This paper looks at the institutional evolution of emigration governance in India from the nineteenth century to the present. Building from Agarwala’s (2022) “Migration Development Regime” framework of emigration governance based on class, I extend it to an analysis of the formation and evolution of emigration institutions through a qualitative study of archival and secondary sources. The data is primarily drawn from the emigration legislation in India, with primary sources being the Emigration Acts of 1864 to 1983 as well as the Draft Emigration Bills of 2019 and 2021. I also use allied secondary sources to emphasize my findings. Analytically, I use a historical-institutionalist framework, hitherto used in the study of immigration policy governance (Tichenor, 2002; Collbern and Ramakrishnan, 2021). I find that legislation and the creation of emigration institutions in the country have roughly followed the migration development regime eras put forward by Agarwala. I classify eras of governance into three distinct iterations. The first two eras follow a class-based demarcation in emigration governance while the proposed management era of governance looks to remove class distinctions while increasing state control of emigration- through the rhetoric of “skill-upgradation”. The study supports findings by Sadiq and Tsourapas (2023) who find distinct continuities in commodification of labour in pre and post-colonial contexts. The study highlights the role of the institutional rationale of protection leading to institutional stickiness, which leads to varied labour migrant outcomes in different eras. I find that while emigration governance has changed in form over these three distinct iterations, the logic of state intervention in emigration regulation through the language of protection has endured. In doing so, I also highlight how legal-institutional stickiness is vital to understanding migration outcomes in post-colonial contexts around the world.