Doctoral Dissertation Research: Asian Indian Immigrants in New York and London: A Study of Transnational Labor Migration

本博士论文研究计划的两个主要目标如下：(1)探讨为什么在20世纪60年代初之后，来自印度的高技能专业和技术工人一直迁移到纽约，而他们的低技能同行一直迁移到伦敦；(2)移民的这些不同技能水平对他们与祖国和接收地区的关系有什么影响？假设移民与各种组织和人际环境的关系会影响移民的类型和目的地，并且这些环境预计在移民的起源和目的地都有显着差异。拟议的研究通过定量的人口统计数据和半结构化的定性访谈来检验这一点，随机抽样的第一代古吉拉特邦人是纽约大都会区和大伦敦地区最大的印度移民群体之一。这种跨国比较突出了亚洲印度侨民中劳动力迁移的广泛差异，并允许我们考虑促进这些特定移民流动的结构性条件以及它们在未来可能发生的变化。

The two main objectives of this doctoral dissertation research proposal are as follows: (1) To explore the questions of why, after the early 1960s, highly-skilled professional and technical workers from India have been migrating to New York, while their low-skill counterparts have been migrating to London; and (2) What are the consequences of these different skill-levels of migrants on their relations with their homeland and with the receiving areas? Migrants' relationships to various organizational and interpersonal environments are hypothesized to affect the types and destination of migration, and these environments are expected to vary significantly at both the origin and destination of migration. The proposed research examines this through quantitative demographic data and semi-structured, qualitative interviews from a random sample of first-generation Gujaratis, one of the largest Indian immigrant groups in the New York metropolitan area and Greater London. This cross-national comparison highlights the wide variation in labor migration within the Asian Indian diaspora, and permits us to consider the structural conditions that promote those particular flows of immigrants and how they might change for the future.