Book Description

The book is dedicated to the real life issues in the process of human migration. It discusses people movement that is tied to immigration and trade policy, where workers are treated as a commodity and is not just about selling a product or a service. It is about finding the future. It explores the future of the workers, the corporations and the society at large.The primary objective however is in finding the future. Not just a future in general, but specific futures for the individuals under the care of policies that govern people movement. The focus is the future in the sense that it makes a prediction about where the future lies and then takes specific steps to make that future happen. That is where the subject of human migration comes in. The globalized political and economic system creates illegality by displacing people and then denying the workers rights and equality as they have to do what they have to do in order to survive. Globalization forces people into migration into countries where the ideas of divide and rule have been codified as a legal justification for the injustices. Inequality therefore is re-created and re introduced by a global economic system. In the realm of social reality - this social inequality creates a caste system, where one class of workers is pitted against the other for personal gain. Where when one side of the coin gets tainted, the other side shines brightly, putting the society at large in a conundrum. This book examines the function of social inequality in a modern world of high-tech guest workers and India’s increasing dependence on exporting people to the labor pool in the global North. This book is titled Green Carrot - America’s Work Visa Crisis in recognition of this reality. While Indian workers serving with employers in the United States has been used as a case study, it aims to drive home a point - Should the human migration exports rest only on the economic needs or should they be more focused on the human rights of its workers?Through the book an attempt is made to explore the politics of the debate over immigration and trade policies between India and the United States. The book examines closely the cultural factors associated with the brokerage of intellectual capital and rights to intellectual property - two distinct yet, vulnerable areas in the political debate on immigration reform. The book examines body shopping as a business model that promotes the brokerage of intellectual capital and ends with the need for innovation, bringing focus on generating intellectual property. The book begins with examining what it means to be an indentured guest worker in labor bondage with a foreign employer - how immigration status is used to keep people vulnerable, to criminalize them and punish them when they try to improve their conditions. The narrative travels to examine how the visa status is used to control the movement of its foreign employee and how the brokerage of intellectual capital allows subjugation for personal gain and its consequences on family life. The book traces back in history to explore America’s dependence on foreign labor and examines how the present day system of body shopping in fact creates an economic system that benefit from the changes causing displacement, and also benefits from the labor displacement produces, especially those on the foreign work visas. It traces the development of the employer lobby set up to win expansion of the work visa programs. How the immigration policies have all but been about low salaries for foreign workers, excluding the local workers from competing for jobs thus dividing the work forces Finally the book suggests some alternatives, always the hardest part in the immigration debate. It concentrates on some of the most progressive ideas, which have been put forward by immigration and human rights activists.