Review on Unruly Immigrants

In the book Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States, Monisha Das Gupta takes a look at the roles of the excluded and ignored South Asian minorities in the USA. From the very beginning, she explains to the readers that her book is about South Asian immigrants, and she adds the characteristic "unruly” due to the fight for their official or legal rights as non-citizens (Das Gupta 4). Although the USA attempts to position itself as the country where there is the American Dream for everyone, its policy provides the welfare of the governing class and the exploitation of its immigrant labor force (Das Gupta 81). The whites have always been a dominant class while the non-white members of society make a “model minority” categorization. Monisha Das Gupta connects her experience as a feminist activist with an ethnographic assessment of South Asian immigrants. While studying the strategies of feminist, labor, and sexual minorities’ organizations, Das Gupta has managed to summarize the struggles of the excluded South Asian immigrants on the territory of the United States. This review aims to show the methods that the author uses to shape Asian-American relations; it focuses on the key points and arguments of the author’s investigation as well as on the strong and weak sides of the work.

The main argument of the book Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States by Monisha Das Gupta, published in 2006, is that the immigrant workers are often determined as non-specialists due to their gender, cultural, ethnical, or sexual identities as well as their economic status and race. The members of progressive movements realize that immigrants need social, political, and economic rights to stay in another country, as they are the members of defenseless social groups who are sensitive to the neglect and violation of their rights. That is why the organizations are formed to fight for their rights; they do not need state citizenship, they only demand their rights as immigrants to fight against different forms of exploitation in the present-day globalization. The first part of the book studies the fight for the immigrant rights and against discrimination based on race, ethnical, and sexual identity. In the beginning, Monisha contrasts "place-taking" groups that seek compromise in politics and "space-making" movements that implement radical politics (Das Gupta 57). The author analyzes the dispute over cultural identity in both types of organizations. Then, the author gives the historical background and social context that provides the evidence about the work of the seven leading movements created by the South Asian immigrants in the United States. The author analyses the principal South Asian organizations in terms of transnational, intersectional, social, and critical approaches; she puts the accent on the feminist, sexual minorities, and labor conflicts. Of course, they have different goals, objectives, and interests, but those seven groups have many things in common. They have one feature that unites them: all of them react to the marginalization, deprivation of rights and freedoms of the non-citizens – immigrants who work as housemaids, taxi drivers, or those who are dismissed as sexual minorities. Those "unruly immigrants" defend the cross-border rights and dispute the contemporary approach to the immigrant rights (Das Gupta 420).

Das Gupta employs the methodology of belonging and exclusion in her work. She speaks about the discriminatory method that is unjust and prejudicial, as it means excluding particular categories of people due to their race, economic status, or sex. She focuses on the experiences of the immigrant group members and the problems they frequently face and fight. Das Gupta’s study increases the reputation of the book; it evokes the readers’ interest due to the persuasive investigation of court materials, academic papers, and some other sources. The author’s arguments are fully supported by the facts. For example, when Das Gupta evaluates the notion of a “model minority” as spreading the idea of difference, she supports her argument by referring to such South Asian scholars as Vijay Prashad and Sharmila Rudrappa (183). She alludes to the Supreme Court cases and regulations. Das Gupta supports her arguments with some historical events; for instance, when speaking about the rights, she gives information about the attempt of the Indian Association to establish a separate class of immigrants. According to Das Gupta, the association intended to position this category of migrants as Americans who required citizenship with equal rights and freedoms (407). The author presents the experiences of the South Asian immigrants through various points of view. In one viewpoint, Das Gupta brings together the stories of the South Asian sexual minorities, feminist, and labor movements. All of them deal with some problems such as homophobia, domestic violence, unemployment, and poverty. Those issues can be defined as general problems of a big South Asian immigrant community. The members of each organization fight with the insight of their identities and rights within the South Asian community. The aim of the movements is to destroy the barriers and damage the stereotypes, such as the "model minority" (Das Gupta 264). When emphasizing the position of the feminist, queer, and labor movements, the author provides a new theoretical basis, in which she describes the organizations that struggle for progress and rights for immigrants. Das Gupta argues that nowadays, in the age of globalization and immigration, there is no need of “fixed” or “rooted” rights; they can be rather “mobile” (4).

Monisha Das Gupta’s book has many strong sides. First, the author presents the assembled investigation based on facts, evidences, and other documents, and it constitutes the main strength of this work. The information is concrete, reasonable, and convincing. The in-depth ethnography of the South Asian immigrant groups is connected with the analytical structure of Das Gupta’s book. Her statements are clear; for example, when she speaks about the existence of discriminatory deportation based on domestic violence of South Asian women, she argues that the states just remove those women who have suffered from the violent abuse.