For love and money: second-generation Indian-Americans ‘return’ to India

Abstract

This article focuses on the ‘return’ of second-generation Indian-American professionals from the US to their parental homeland, India. Based on qualitative interviews with forty-eight second-generation Indian-Americans working in the cities of New Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad, it examines the question of why they ‘return’ to India. Data suggest that better job opportunities in India motivated and enabled respondents to ‘return’. Importantly, they also ‘returned’ to develop an independent and personal relationship with the country. Their migration decisions were shaped by their transnational praxis and cultural affiliations to India and the stage in the life-course. My findings also suggest that for some second-generation immigrants, ‘return’ does not necessarily imply permanent settlement in the parental homeland or mark the end of the migration cycle.

Keywords:

• Highly-skilled
• second-generation
• India
• ‘return’ migration
• transnationalism

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Nazli Kibria, Dennis Conway, Jackie Hagan, Megan Reynolds, Ben Kail, Mara Buchbinder, Michele Easter and Sabrina Pendergrass and to the two anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback on previous drafts.

Notes

1. Here, the second generation includes children born in the US to Indian immigrant parents and those who came with them before the age of 12 (Portes and Zhou 1993).

2. Such return has also been described as ‘roots migration’ (Wessendorf 2007) and ‘ethnic return migration’ (Tsuda 2009). To improve readability, I hereafter use the term ‘return’ without quotes.

3. Included are the adjoining cities of Gurgaon and Noida, which form part of the National Capital Region (NCR) of Delhi.

4. It is likely that the reason respondents did not appear worried about or experience encountering the glass ceiling was that most of them were relatively early in their careers. A possible explanation for why respondents disregarded race in explaining their return is that due to class privilege, they were largely shielded from racism. Still, data suggest that by virtue of their family origins and phenotype, they did not have the ethnic option to simply be American in the US. Even as respondents negated the salience of racism in their adult lives in the US, several of them noted it felt ‘special’ to ‘look’ like most other Indians in India.

5. This is a recent development, as ‘Historically Indians leaving the country were chastised as having crossed kaala paani, or black water, and were therefore impure .’ (Khanna 2007,p. 181). Khanna observes that the Indian government reconsidered its attitude towards its diaspora when a balance of payments crisis in 1991 prompted it to turn to the diaspora for capital.

6. In his study of first-generation Indian Hindus and Korean Protestants and their children, Min (2010) observes that even reduced temple attendance enables the second generation to preserve their ethnic heritage and identity.

7. It is interesting that Ajay uses the term American Born Confused Desi (ABCD), because it is generally used by South Asians to connote the second generation's non-belonging to their respective national cultures.

8. An exception was a parent who noted that that one of the reasons for their living in India was to protect their daughter, as she grew older, from the dangers of the streets of New York. However, they remained conflicted about raising her in New Delhi or New York.