Journal of Asian American Studies

The Opportunity Trap highlights the unheard voices of H-4 dependent visa holders in the United States who remain in the shadows of their highly skilled spouses. Dr. Pallavi Banerjee, who herself was on a dependent visa, compares the migration experiences of Indian families whose breadwinners work in two sectors of high demand for H-1B professional visa holders: Information Technology (IT) companies and nursing. Banerjee does so by illustrating stories gathered from 125 migrant family interviews, of which fifty-five were couples. By shifting her perspective to understudied family members, such as the children and spouses on H-4 visas, Banerjee expands understandings of the current US immigration system by showing how it imposes a normative family form and a traditional division of labor among its beneficiaries.

Banerjee utilizes a breadth of theories to develop her own concepts of the "visa regime" and the condition of "legal liminality," which allow her to investigate the gendered repercussions of the visa system on spouses who are only permitted to be on dependent visas and the subsequent effect on families with children. Through her "visa regime" concept, she demonstrates that US migration laws are not neutral in regard to gender and race, although the policies attempt to present themselves as such. Banerjee describes the visa regime as a systematic "technique that controls the lives and subjectivities of immigrant workers and families through the reconstructions of the self as gendered and racialized beings" (6). She grounds her analytical framework in Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality and its techniques of domination and the self to relate how the visa regime wields power over families and individuals. Banerjee directly quotes language from the US Immigration and Citizenship Services (USICS) which declares that the government has the right to "continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not …" (9). Banerjee details types of working and dependent visas and their conditions while providing a concise history of US immigration law as it pertains to Asian migration history. She thus establishes how the evolution of racialized migration laws, from complete exclusion to allowed quotas of ethnic and racial groups, exemplifies the USICS's historic redefinition of the state's power.

The use of governmentality in the visa regime framework is compounded by Cecelia Menjívar's concept of liminal legality, from which Banerjee derives her own term, "legal liminality," under the visa regime. According to Banerjee, legal liminality is the "in-between status of legality that makes [migrant workers [End Page 290] and their spouses] beholden to their employers through the visa regime" (29). Legal liminality is a condition where migrant workers are constantly at risk of losing their visa due to the visa's tie to their employer. Workers are aware of the constant threat of "delegalization and deportation" should they not abide by employers' coercive demands.

Banerjee illustrates how the Indian state enables the high-tech and nursing industries to essentially broker labor. The system of promotions and training, with the end goal of outsourcing, eventually creates migrants who experience "legal liminality" in the US and must therefore endure racially exploitative work environments. She uses multiple case studies to show how the line between the public sphere (work) and the private sphere (home) is blurred among visa holders, further highlighting the gendered social control of the visa regime. For example, Banerjee shows how US employers deny workers, particularly men, time off to care for sick children because dependent spouses are expected to handle such family obligations.

To explore the ways that the visa regime creates gendered control, Banerjee draws upon Raewyn Connell's argument of the institutional heterosexual nuclear family and Barbara Risman's dimensions of integrative theory of gender. In so doing, The Opportunity Trap...