Traffic in the diaspora : Pakistan, modernity and labor migration

This dissertation is an ethnography of transnationalism in recent working-class migration from Pakistan. Using multi-sited research, I track the state-subject relationship present in the process of transnational migration. This study focuses on Pakistan as a sending country and examines the movement of its labor diasporas. The Middle East, Europe and North America (primarily the United States) are the main sites of destination for the transnational labor investigated. Since the 1970s transnational labor migration has created significant economic and cultural changes in Pakistan. To understand these changes I conducted ethnographic research of the migration industry primarily in Lahore and the province of Punjab, Pakistan. This research centered on migrant narratives, the formation of transnational subjectivities and the role of the state in transnational migration. The experience of working class labor migration is structured by the labor-capital relationship. The state mediates this process through material controls and the discursive conception of a citizen-subject. In Pakistan, the particular modernity present between the state and transnational labor migration manifests itself in the formation of migrant vi subjectivity. This subjectivity is shaped through secular and religious categories that frame transnational conceptions of class and race. Chapter One, explores the place of the secular in the experience of modernity and Islam. This is important in situating the place of labor migrant narratives and the possibilities of secular and religious imaginaries. Chapter Two sets the stage for the ethnographic work of this dissertation through an examination of development literature in South Asia as it relates to labor history and labor migration. Chapter Three is an extensive ethnography of the system of the migration industry as it produces labor migrations and an exploration of the racial and class implications of these labor flows. Chapter Four begins an ethnographic study of the state through the issue of subject formation and the concept of the production of legality and illegality. Chapter Five explores the role of moral panics and racism as forms of representations of labor and migrants. Chapter Six explores two narratives of transnational labor migration, one secular and the other religious, in contemplating the use of utopias in labor migrant imaginaries.