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The chapter discusses the delivery and evaluation of a women-only physical activity and yoga programme designed to improve physical activity, social isolation and well-being amongst South Asian and Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) migrant women living in areas of high economic deprivation. The chapter provides an accessible insight into the aims, objectives, methods and findings of the study. It provides important recommendations on how researchers and service providers can deliver culturally tailored community-based health interventions It will be demonstrated that social support such as childcare provision, child-friendly sessions and social media forums, determined by the target population can mitigate misconceptions about South-Asian and BME migrant women as being difficult to engage in health interventions.

This chapter explores the ways that South Asian migrants confronted and evaded obstacles set up by the U.S. and British empire-states throughout the Pacific and Central America. It first considers how barriers to mobility at official ports diverted the itineraries of South Asian migrants farther south to Panama and Mexico and toward the U.S. border. It then discusses the impact of multiracial families on the U.S. government's interpretation of immigration regulations and distribution of citizenship. It also examines how South Asian migrants eluded barriers to mobility and opportunity by mobilizing flexible forms of citizenship and identity and harnessing social, kinship, and institutional networks as well as forms of intimate dependency.

This chapter discusses how the rice cookers followed Asian migrants, students, and businessmen to Asian diasporas in Europe and North America. In 1979, National's all-male rice cooker team began to recruit female rice specialists who became known as “rice ladies.” Their research led to the development of new models that prepared more flavorful steamed rice and Cantonese congee. The versatile model was so valued by Hong Kongers that, when they began to immigrate to Canada, Australia, and other countries after the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984, many took their rice cookers with them.

This book situates immigration laws within a larger context by focusing on the global migration of South Asians using frameworks of empire and global power. It features chapters that look into the South Asian diaspora and how it has been shaped by political movements, globalization, neoliberalism, and imperialism. These chapters challenge the dominant assumptions in the field of South Asian American studies while also addressing the contemporary political and economic conjuncture and the places of South Asian migration within it. The book also examines how South Asian migrants to the United States have joined the ranks of working-class recent immigrants of color who are asked to perform affective labor for the urban elite.

This chapter recounts the influx of South Asian migrants to the UK since 1947, which was motivated by a need to escape civil war, to seek better economic opportunities, for marriage or to join family members. It cites the 2011 census indicating that South Asians represent the largest minority group in Britain and many of them are contributing to economic, social, and political life. It highlights the disadvantages of South Asian women migrants, such as language barriers, lack of education, lack of skills, poor-quality housing, unemployment, and specific forms of violence associated with the various cultural and religious practices that define their identity. The chapter discusses the increase in gender-based power imbalance that reinforces the patriarchal structures of both the host and migrant cultures, which leads to the further marginalisation and victimisation of women.

This chapter offers a perspective on the panoply of responses to the conditions of human trafficking as a downside of globalization. Globalization is defined in this chapter as a world-historical phenomenon that orders human beings in a differential system of rewards and exclusions—whether they are ready or not. These conditions have created a human rights crisis in Asia—human trafficking, or, the recruitment or transfer, through abduction, fraud, coercion, or violence, of human beings for the purpose of exploitation. Hence, the dominant anti-trafficking regimes offer a powerful and distorting lens through which to see how the world and people's lives are being reshaped by migration.

The chapter introduces how middling migrants now comprise the majority of regular migration flows to post-industrial countries where migrants with skills and educational capital are increasingly prioritized over unskilled migrant workers. While this middle space is one of relative privilege compared to low-skilled and undocumented labour migrants globally, it is also a space, particularly for those who are young and navigating early career and life transitions, of decidedly uneven experiences. Exploring these lived experiences of mobile temporality is highly significant to migration studies, largely because these experiences reflect the broader spatio-temporal changes migration has undergone in our current era of globalized modernity. The chapter explains that the book seeks to highlight the multifarious ways that temporality operates within the lives of young and middle-class migrants from Asia to Australia whose open-ended mobilities criss-cross multiple spaces, statuses and identities. It draws on the concept of chronomobilities, which it uses to describe the temporalities that structure mobile lives as well as emerge from them. It positions chronomobilities — which encompass the disjunctures, velocities, synchronizations and rhythms of everyday mobile lives and the meanings they entail — as fundamentally shaped by specific global and national 'time-regimes' of the early 21st century. It also argues that three 'time-logics' emerge as the primary ways in which time is 'lived' and understood within migrants' own meaning making and narrations of their lives under these broader temporal conditions. The focus on the three logics — sequence, tempo and synchronicity — allows time to be understood as multiply and simultaneously sequential, rhythmic and relational.

This chapter explores the role of the home and the household as structuring forces in the lives of domestic workers and how they are entwined with the issue of gender in contemporary theorizations of South Asian diaspora. As physical spaces of labor, the home and household were sites of economic relations to be brought under labor regulations. As targets of political struggle, they were spaces to be transformed. Both understandings recognized the ideological constitution of home and household as central to shaping quotidian diasporic life embedded in dominant notions of the private and the public. Using data gathered at Worker's Awaaz and the legal case of one of its domestic worker members, this chapter considers the mechanisms of entry and placement through which South Asian migrants become part of a diasporic formation. It also examines the implicit gendering of diaspora as male through attention to movement and rupture associated with men.

This chapter explores the ways that South Asian migrants to the United States have joined the ranks of Latinos and other working-class migrant workers who are asked to perform affective labor for the urban elite. Focusing on New York's service industry, it considers the relationship between exploitative practices in low-status jobs and the managerial rhetoric of the family. It shows that small-business owners in urban South Asian enclaves in the United States make use of the concept of the family as a managerial ideology that complements the country's dominant cultural narratives about family businesses, immigrant communities, and Asian cultures. In this context, the family functions as a managerial tool that attempts to privatize economic relations and screen them from public view and regulation.

This book has chronicled the international lives of South Asian migrants in the United States. It has examined these migrants' journeys, across the Pacific Rim and the Indian and Atlantic Oceans into New York and New Orleans, and how their visions of life and liberty expanded along with their travels. It has also highlighted American imperialism and its impact on people in dire need of migration, people like Julio Jubala and Kumari Lakshmi Devi but also earlier intellectuals such as the radical journalist Kumar Goshal. Writing in the Pittsburgh Courier and in the National Guardian, Goshal offered an anti-imperialist account of India's struggle for freedom and of America's self-imposed obligations for empire. This Afterword also reflects on personal experience as a professor of an undergraduate course on the South Asian diaspora at Cornell University.

This chapter examines the effects of global capitalism on India's class divide and economic development. Focusing on the case of Hyderabad, it considers the fate of skilled migrant workers in the information technology industry who stay in India and compares their situation with that of Indian guest workers who travel to the United States to find jobs in the low-wage industrial labor market sectors. It first provides a background on neoliberal reform in India and the country's relationship with the United States in the neoliberal global system. It then considers complicating depictions of the emergence of a globally connected Indian middle class tied to the proliferation of outsourcing. The chapter's analysis of shifting labor markets shows that neoliberal globalization has benefited India's capitalist classes more than the poor and working classes. It also illustrates how dislocation and poverty have forced many South Asian migrants to risk moving to other regions of the world.