US immigration policy changes reshaped South Asian migrants from professionals to workers.

Evidence

The visible demographic of South Asians in the U.S., most of whom are Indian in origin, are from the professional, educated classes drawn to the American service economy after immigration laws shifted in 1965 to specifically attract technically skilled migrants. When family reunification became an immigration priority in the 1990s, this population, which had been largely middle class, began to change in character to include larger demographics from the lower-middle and working classes (Mathew 2005, 119; Prashad 2000). In the case of Pakistan, gender roles, di√erences in education, and access to resources meant that working-class migrants initially were mostly men. Since the 1980s, many of these working-class men have sponsored the immigration of their extended families or maintained their transnational family relationships through seasonal migration. In the latter kinship arrangement, family members are divided between home and host country, and sometimes scattered in multiple countries. The transnational migrants work for extended periods of time, then return to their families during vacations or at seasonal intervals in Pakistan. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 916

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how labor migration regimes (1965 immigration act, 1990s family reunification) restructure diasporic communities — parallels the Milgrom trade-institution material on how policy reshapes economic behavior. — connects to: Indian migrants to the US came predominantly as petty bourgeois, not workers — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 327