Informal Economy and Migration

Priyanka Saharia on December 19th, 2016

In association with the India Bangladesh migration crisis in Assam and largely in the north east of India, it is a complex issue at hand. While the problem is framed by certain interest groups within political rhetoric in the mainstream media of Delhi, international migration is fundamentally a social movement across legally determined boundaries and therefore requires structural adjustments rather than rhetorical concepts organising the transpiring reality, in the host as well as the home country.

Political crisis in host countries due to rapid influx of migrants occur chiefly due to incongruence of living patterns which start from production relations and go up to belief systems. Often assimilation, on ground is not a frictionless process. Therefore these processes of assimilation need to be aided and facilitated with a humane sensitivity by the State. Bangladesh migrants in Assam face a similar reality in the wake of a State having failed to tackle the structural problems of the matter at hand like census reports, issuance of ration and identity cards and land schemes.

The informal economy is born as an outcome of this non- institutionalised chaos which not only creates arbitrage in prices of commodities and services in the market, thus siphoning off customers from the institutional outlets of the host country into these cheaper options but also puts a huge section of workers at risk for their working conditions. Several dimensions in this problem could be graded and gendered in various contexts with increasing degree of risk posed to children and women as wage labourers. Therefore schemes, like demonetisation often hits these sections the hardest who often don’t, necessarily hoard ‘black money’ churned out of ‘corrupted practices’. On the contrary they rely on cash as the only medium for transactions due to the several intersecting institutional marginalisation faced, that often don’t enable them to access the benefits of several schemes of the state.To conclude, I believe there could be productive work conducted on topics of international migration focusing on political economies as well as moral economies of the people, both from the host and the home countries with a special focus on material artefacts. Material artefacts often prove to be reflections of biographies of a certain cultural cohort which can help one gain an insight into their lived realities which are not overtly manifest in statistical studies. To understand the material in terms of moral and understand why some interpretations become ‘political’ and some are left out, is itself a political inquiry into delineating the polyphony of voices that make a social reality of trans-nationalism, be it from the migrant’s side or the person who is negotiating with the migrant ‘other’ to co-exist in his home country.

To conclude, I believe there could be productive work conducted on topics of international migration focusing on political economies as well as moral economies of the people, both from the host and the home countries with a special focus on material artefacts. Material artefacts often prove to be reflections of biographies of a certain cultural cohort which can help one gain an insight into their lived realities which are not overtly manifest in statistical studies. To understand the material in terms of moral and understand why some interpretations become ‘political’ and some are left out, is itself a political inquiry into delineating the polyphony of voices that make a social reality of trans-nationalism, be it from the migrant’s side or the person who is negotiating with the migrant ‘other’ to co-exist in his home country.