5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

This panel seeks to deepen our understanding of how migration states (as sending and receiving nations) and migrants (as immigrants and emigrants) have long interacted to shape global inequality and well-being across and within countries. To do so, this panel interrogates a new framework--the Migration-Development Regime or MDR—to analyze the political economy of labor migration. MDRs offer a more refined theorization of labor migration that is refracted by a truly global gaze that includes the global North and South, a historical perspective that can isolate the continuities and discontinuities of global labor migration, and a comparative lens across nation, gender, race, caste, and class. Although the MDR framework is intended to cover different national and sub-national contexts, the papers in this panel draw from the case of India—the world’s largest migrant exporter and remittance recipient, and a major migrant importer. The panel’s anchor paper (by Agarwala) explains the MDR framework in the context of state-migrant relations among low-skilled Indian emigrants to the Gulf and high-skilled Indian emigrants to the US from the 1800s to the present. The other five papers employ varying methodologies (archival, quantitative, and qualitative) to engage the analytical utility of the MDR framework by extending it across new historical time periods and engaging it against additional analytical vectors including gender, race, and caste.