Book Reviews 1601

Martina Tazzioli’s Border Abolitionism will serve as a durable resource for schol-
ars interested in introducing an abolitionist lens to their policy recommendations and
teaching, and for those who wish to understand the long genealogies of contemporary
movements advancing the rights of people on the move. Understanding human
mobility outside of the shackles of state bordering mechanisms allows readers to
envision a future free of the violence that enforcing such borders invokes. Tazzioli
constructs mobility as a common good, and Border Abolitionism contributes to the
advancement of that good’s global accessibility.

References
Ahmed, Sara. 2019. What’s the Use? Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/
j.ctv11hpr0r.
Flores, Lupe Alberto. Forthcoming. “Mobile Data, Im/mobile Bodies: Digital Innovation,
Automated Inspections and the Dis/Enchantment of CBP One™ Across the Extended
Mexico-US Border.” Migration & Society: The Anti-Refugee Machine, Special Issue
edited by Magnus Treiber and Trisha Redeker-Hepner.

Book Review: The

Banerjee, Pallavi. 2022. The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the
Failures of The Dependent Visa Program. New York: NYU Press. 336 pp. $32.00.

Reviewed by: Melissa V. Abad, Stanford VMWare Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab, Stanford
University, USA
DOI: 10.1177/01979183241247715

The Opportunity Trap centers on the lives of 50 H1B visa holders and how their fam-
ilies fare in the United States. Two pathways are detailed: one led by male tech
workers, and another led by female nurses. Banerjee’s text outlines the racialized
and gendered processes that shape their experiences. First, she compares the gen-
dered occupational logic in nursing and information technology work to examine
how feminized care logic and masculinized technological skills facilitate visa pro-
curement and inform how this group distances itself from other non-whites in the
United States. Second, the dependent spouse or H4 visa holder, both credentialed
professionals, must manage US immigration policy’s gendered logic that takes for
granted that the trailing spouses have the desire to participate in the formal labor
market. On the one hand, the female spouse is reluctantly converted into a housewife
with little to no privileges. The male trailing spouse struggles with not being the
breadwinner. In each case, the couples are forced to be creative with protecting
1602 International Migration Review 58(3)

each other’s sense of gendered professional self. The visa regime, “as a technique that
controls the lives and subjectivities of immigrant workers and their families” (p. 6), is
the core apparatus that couples contend with. The model minority framework was a
tool both migrant tech workers and nurses used to regain agency. In short, the text
illustrates how heteronormative family logic shapes migration policy and is compli-
cated by the racial project of the skilled migrant labor force.
One hundred twenty-five interviews and over 500 observation hours were
completed in the 2000s before Obama signed the 2015 executive order that autho-
rized dependent spouses to work. As a result, these data provide a crucial
behind-the-scenes view of how highly skilled immigrants, independent of their cre-
dentials, are exploited through the visa regime. The intersectional lens on family,
migration, and work is brought to life with a glimpse into the intimate experiences
of sitting at a respondent’s kitchen table or riding Chicago’s El train. Throughout
the book, Banerjee showcases her careful feminist methodological lens by naming
her privilege and how her two identities—Indian national and US academic—
informed her relationship with research participants. The in-depth interviews, inti-
mate engagement, and reflexivity throughout the text are evidence of methodological
rigor that provides a text that will be great for any graduate or undergraduate course
on migration, family, work, and public policy.
The first two chapters demonstrate how the nuclear family construct creates a cage
for both migrant worker and their spouse, where the talents of both are interpreted
through a gendered lens. The first summarizes three distinct mechanisms: H1B
visa procurement, immigration policy around skilled workers, and the parallel
recruitment processes of recruiting male tech workers and Indian female nurses. A
vital dimension of family migration policy is to protect the US social safety net
from the assumed burden of the dependent spouse. The second chapter details the
dependent spouses’ invisibility, the challenges they face interacting in public
spaces, and the strain that these new challenges place on immigrants’ marriages.
The three chapters that follow detail the visa regime’s impact on family dynamics.
Chapter 3 extends the explanatory power of legal liminality (Menjívar 2006). The
leading spouses’ relationship with their employer-sponsor must be protected to
secure the employer’s sponsorship of a green card. Protecting their gendered
model minority worker status is a tool used to secure a pathway toward legalization.
How couples assign tasks along gendered lines is covered in Chapter 4, where
Banerjee explains how, for example, men become the household’s financial
manager. The last empirical chapter employs a postcolonial and critical feminist
lens on how the visa regime informs parenting and introduces the term transcultural
cultivation. This parenting style combines US middle-class practices, such as invest-
ing in talent-based activities, and Indian cultural values such as communal-oriented
upbringing and respecting the extended family unit. Family scholars may expect
more data from children, but the text intends to center the adults as workers,
spouses, and parents and how they interact with various US bureaucracies. This
text is a call to social scientists to design research projects that close the theoretical
gaps between various subfields in their disciplines to create policy change.
Book Reviews 1603

Reference
Menjívar, C. 2006. “Liminal Legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan Immigrants’ Lives in the
United States.” American Journal of Sociology 111(4):999–1037.

Book Review: Mobility

Achtnich, Marthe. 2023. Mobility Economies in Europe’s Borderlands: Migrants’ Journeys Through
Libya and the Mediterranean. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, New Delhi, Singapore:
Cambridge University Press. 212 pp., £ 85.00 (Hardback).

Reviewed by: Josef Neubauer, University for Continuing Education Krems

Over the past two decades, scholars have produced an enormous volume of research
on migration in and across the Mediterranean. What is there to add?—Well, a lot,
shows Marthe Achtnich in her book Mobility Economies in Europe’s Borderlands,
in which she ethnographically traces African mobilities through the Sahara, Libya,
the Mediterranean Sea, and Malta. Achtnich takes the readers beyond conventional
economic analyses of migration as rational decision-making or movement of labor.
Rather, she draws attention to what she calls mobility economies: the “variegated
and intersecting economic practices—clandestine, state-linked or intimate—that
shape and are shaped by mobility” (p. 4). They include a range of actors including
brokers, militias, officials, landlords, and employers who exploit and profit from
migrants’ mobilities. But they also involve migrants as agents devising multifarious
strategies to pursue their aspirations and cope with the hazardous conditions along
their journeys. Achtnich’s overarching argument is that a dedicated focus on such
mobility economies opens up new perspectives on the economization and exploita-
tion of mobility under contemporary capitalism.
The book spearheads an emerging literature on bioeconomies in the context of
mobility, which brings into conversation economic anthropology with biopolitical
perspectives. The relevance of this new scholarship stretches far into migration
and border studies, geography, and the broader social sciences. Indeed, the focus
on economic practices and the actors involved in migration links this book to the lit-
erature on migration industries (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Sørensen 2013) and migra-
tion infrastructures (Xiang and Lindquist 2014), though these connections could have
been discussed more explicitly in the book.