Nikhar Gaikwad's ISERP Fellowship: Identity and Emigration

Nikhar Gaikwad, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, served as the inaugural ISERP Fellow in Fall 2025. Gaikwad used the Fellowship to work on his book project, Identity and Emigration: Migration Decisions and Political Consequences in Ranked Ethnic Systems.

Extensive work has shown that emigration has the potential to transform the lives of migrants and their families and to reshape the politics of sending regions. It matters a great deal, then, who takes overseas employment opportunities and why. The starting point of Gaikwad’s research was his finding from dozens of countries around the world that members of minority or underrepresented groups nearly always make up a disproportionate share of cross-border emigrants. In turn, he used the Fellowship to develop and test a theoretical argument to explain these migration patterns and study their implications for the politics of sending regions where particular types of identity-based groups reside. Theoretically, Gaikwad argued that in ranked ethnic systems, where class and ethnicity overlap, members of disadvantaged groups face discrimination in domestic labor markets and thus view emigration as a relatively favorable path to mobility. Discrimination can limit the skills that members of minority groups bring to the global economy, but escaping that discrimination can also make emigration more attractive. This, in turn, has implications for economic resources and political behavior in sending communities. Members of underrepresented groups are more likely to migrate and augment wealth in rights-poor countries (such as autocracies) than members of advantaged groups; lacking pathways to political incorporation in these destinations, they are also more likely to return home with economic resources to augment the power of political parties representing the interests of minority communities.

The centerpiece of Gaikwad’s empirical research during the Fellowship was the study of ethnicity and migration patterns in Kerala, India’s most migration-intensive state. Using seven rounds of the Kerala Migration Survey and an original, in-depth survey of migrants and non-migrants from various religious and caste communities in Kerala, Gaikwad’s research documented that members of discriminated groups are substantially more likely to migrate abroad, particularly to rights-poor countries such as those in the Persian Gulf, while individuals belonging to advantaged groups predominate in migration to rights-rich destinations like western liberal democracies. His work probed how discrimination shapes migration aspirations and perceptions of opportunity, and how migration feeds back into the politics of sending communities, influencing attitudes toward democracy, redistribution, and globalization. The Fellowship permitted Gaikwad to travel to India during the semester to conduct qualitative and quantitative research to probe these claims. He also explored the implications of the book project’s argument for a range of other historical and comparative cases, such as Ireland and England during the 19th and early 20th centuries and other regions of South Asia in more contemporary periods.

Finally, Gaikwad used the Fellowship to plan and organize a conference on the broad theme of “Identity and International Political Economy” in Fall 2026. The conference focuses on how global economic integration alleviates or magnifies identity-based disparities, and the political consequences of these changes. The cross-border flows of goods and services, people, pollutants and greenhouse gases, and capital have the potential to upend the social hierarchies that produce group-based disparities or reinforce them. Yet existing research has paid inadequate theoretical and empirical attention to the processes by which globalization alters group relations and the short- and long-term political consequences of these changes. This conference aims to introduce cutting-edge scholarship emerging in this domain and foster conversations with scholars who have studied the broader impacts of globalization on domestic political outcomes.