Globalization and Migration: Economic Opportunities and Challenges

When India opened its economy to the world in 1991, it did not just invite foreign capital and new industries. It set millions of people in motion. Workers left villages for cities, professionals boarded flights to Silicon Valley and Dubai, and construction sites filled with labourers from distant states. Globalization and migration became deeply intertwined, feeding off each other in ways that reshaped both the economy and the social fabric. But this movement of people has never been a simple success story. For every software engineer landing a job abroad, there is a daily-wage worker living in a city that does not recognise them as its own. Understanding this dual character is essential to grasping how globalization actually works on the ground.

How 1991 changed the map of movement
The opportunity side: who gained from globalization
The rise of the global Indian professional
The economic weight of remittances
The less-skilled migrants who built the boom
The challenge side: globalization and precarity
Understanding Guy Standing’s precariat
Job insecurity and the absence of mobility
The problem of political representation
The pandemic as a mirror
Two faces of the same process

How 1991 changed the map of movement

The economic crisis of 1991 forced a dramatic shift in policy. Facing a near-bankruptcy in international payments, the government launched a series of reforms in the industrial, trade, and financial sectors to make the economy more competitive. These reforms came to be known by three words: Liberalisation, Privatisation, and Globalisation (LPG). The state reduced its control over business, dismantled the licence system, and opened markets to global capital.

This restructuring had a direct effect on the movement of people. As new industries and service sectors expanded rapidly in urban areas, they pulled in workers from across the country. Both supporters and critics of the new economic policy agreed that reforms would increase internal migration, though they disagreed on whether this was a good thing. Proponents argued the new economy would create jobs and draw people into prosperous cities. Critics warned that the same reforms might hurt rural and village industries, pushing impoverished people toward cities out of desperation rather than opportunity.

Both predictions turned out to be partly true. The scale of internal movement is staggering. According to the 2011 Census, there were 450 million internal migrants, a 45% increase over the 309 million recorded in 2001. This growth far outpaced the population growth rate of 18% during the same decade. Migrants rose from 30% of the population in 2001 to 37% in 2011.

The opportunity side: who gained from globalization

Globalization opened doors at two very different levels of the workforce. The first group is skilled professionals, and their story is the one most often celebrated.

The rise of the global Indian professional

The growth of the IT industry created a new class of globally mobile professionals. Companies like TCS, Infosys, and Wipro became household names, and engineers, doctors, and technology workers found pathways abroad that simply did not exist before. The United States became a prime destination, with most professionals working under the H-1B visa programme. The Indian diaspora is now the largest group of skilled migrant workers in the world, spanning healthcare, science, engineering, and academia.

This skilled emigration was long feared as a “brain drain,” but newer research complicates that picture. A study published in Science found that expanded access to H-1B visas raised the earnings of Indians in the US by 10% and increased IT employment within India by 5.8%. When migration pathways open, more people invest in acquiring skills aligned with global demand. This can leave the origin country with more skilled workers, not fewer. Economists now call this “brain gain” or “brain circulation.”

The economic weight of remittances

Money sent home by migrants has become one of the economy’s most important external supports. India has been the largest recipient of remittances in the world since 2008, and in 2022 became the first country to exceed $100 billion in a single year. The Reserve Bank of India reports that remittances more than doubled from $55.6 billion in 2010-11 to $118.7 billion in 2023-24. These inflows help finance the trade deficit and act as a cushion against economic shocks.

Interestingly, the source of this money is shifting. For decades, the Gulf Cooperation Council countries supplied the bulk of remittances, sent home largely by lower- and semi-skilled workers in construction and services. By 2023-24, however, advanced economies like the US and UK surpassed Gulf inflows, reflecting the growing weight of the skilled diaspora.

The less-skilled migrants who built the boom

Not all opportunity flows to the top. The same period drew enormous numbers of less-skilled workers into cities and overseas labour markets. The Gulf corridor, fuelled by continued demand for low- and semi-skilled workers in construction alongside skilled healthcare professionals, absorbed millions. Even lower-skilled migration can transform household fortunes. Research found that workers migrating abroad through legal channels often see significant earnings gains, with remittances nearly doubling the income of families left behind.

The challenge side: globalization and precarity

For all these gains, globalization also produced a darker pattern of insecurity. The reforms that liberated capital also weakened the protections that once shielded workers. This is where the concept of the precariat becomes useful.

Understanding Guy Standing’s precariat

The economist Guy Standing coined the term “precariat” in his 2011 book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. He describes a growing class of people who live and work precariously in a series of short-term jobs, without stable occupational identities or adequate social protection. Crucially, Standing blames globalization for plunging more and more people into this condition.

What defines the precariat is not just low pay but a bundle of insecurities. Standing identifies several overlapping forms, including labour market security, employment security, job security, income security, and representation security. Migrant workers sit squarely within this class. In fact, Standing explicitly names immigrants and migrants among the core groups that make up the precariat, often denied a sense of belonging in the places they work.

The relevance to India is direct. The post-1991 economy expanded chiefly through the growth of the informal sector and new forms of labour exploitation, where jobs come without contracts, benefits, or job security. The very flexibility that makes the economy attractive to global capital is what makes life unstable for the worker.

Job insecurity and the absence of mobility

Migrant workers in cities typically enter informal occupations: construction, domestic work, hotels, small manufacturing. These jobs rarely offer a ladder upward. A study of migrants in Delhi found that, despite being citizens, internal migrants lack rights in practice, often forced into dependent relationships with contractors, employers, and moneylenders just to survive. Welfare entitlements are usually tied to proof of residence, which assumes stability, yet the migrant’s defining trait is mobility. The result is a trap: the worker keeps moving for work but never accumulates the security a settled life would bring.

The problem of political representation

Perhaps the sharpest issue is political voice. A migrant who works in one state but votes in another is, in practical terms, invisible to the city’s political class. As one analysis put it, because workers are not voters of the city where they work, local politicians tend to remain indifferent to their hardship. This lack of representation security is exactly what Standing warns about. Without a political stake, migrants fall through the cracks of policy.

The pandemic as a mirror

The COVID-19 lockdown of 2020 exposed all of these vulnerabilities at once. When the national lockdown was declared, millions of migrant workers found themselves stranded in cities with no income, no shelter, and no transport home. The images of people walking hundreds of kilometres on foot, facing starvation and social prejudice, brought their vulnerability to the forefront. They were treated as “carriers” of disease, unwelcome both in the cities and, on return, in their home villages.

The contrast with skilled migrants was stark. The state efficiently organised resources to repatriate Indians stranded abroad, yet this same vigour was largely absent for internal migrant labourers, raising hard questions about the state’s commitment to its own working poor. The crisis revealed that, for the precariat, citizenship on paper does not guarantee protection in practice.

Two faces of the same process

What emerges is not a story of globalization being simply good or bad, but of it producing sharply unequal outcomes. The same economic opening that allowed a software engineer to triple their income in California also created the informal construction job that left a worker without a contract. The forces are connected. Global capital demands a flexible, mobile workforce, and that demand simultaneously creates opportunity at the top and precarity at the bottom.

The challenge for policy is to extend the security that the skilled enjoy to those who built the boom from below. This means portable welfare entitlements that travel with the worker across state lines, genuine enforcement of labour protections in the informal sector, and mechanisms that give migrants a political voice where they actually live and work. Until then, globalization will continue to wear two faces at once.

What do you think? If a worker contributes to a city’s economy but cannot vote there, how should our political system represent their interests? And as global demand keeps reshaping who moves and why, can the benefits of migration ever be shared fairly without stronger protections for the precariat?

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Table of Contents

How 1991 changed the map of movement 🔗

The opportunity side: who gained from globalization 🔗

The rise of the global Indian professional 🔗

The economic weight of remittances 🔗

The less-skilled migrants who built the boom 🔗

The challenge side: globalization and precarity 🔗

Understanding Guy Standing’s precariat 🔗

Job insecurity and the absence of mobility 🔗

The problem of political representation 🔗

The pandemic as a mirror 🔗

Two faces of the same process 🔗