The Opportunity Trap

Pallavi Banerjee is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Calgary. She directs the Critical Gender, Intersectionality and Migration Research Group at the University of Calgary, and her research is supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Canada and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).

Powerful and vivid, The Opportunity Trap tells us of the pains wrought by legal dependency on temporary visa workers and their spouses. Both are suspended and indentured by law. This gender comparative study of hi-tech workers and nurses is a must read as it advances our understanding of immigration, the family, and law in the United States. -- Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, author of Unfree: Migrant Domestic Work in Arab States Through her insightful analyses of how dependent visas reflect a gendered and racialized regime that controls immigrant families, Banerjee brilliantly identifies the many contradictions faced by Indian migrant workers and their families in the U.S. The Opportunity Trap beautifully captures how the visa regime devalues and makes invisible those on dependent visas, reworks gender relations and parenting within the household, while also making families excessively beholden to migrant workers' employers. This is an important book that should be widely read. -- Joya Misra, co-author of Walking Mannequins: How Race and Gender Inequalities Shape Retail Clothing Work