Review: Emerging Occupations: A. Aneesh, Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 208 pp., ISBN 0822336693, US$21.95

The invention of the Internet is widely viewed as a technological revolution with potentially enormous consequences for all spheres of life and society. The present book concerns itself with one aspect of this revolution, the transformation of (paid) work that it has set in motion. More specifically, it analyses the way in which the Internet has created a virtual labor market, permitting a growing number of workers to stay in their location of origin and yet to participate in the global economy. Empirically, the author focuses on Indian software engineers who work for American businesses. In the past, such engagement would have necessitated their physical migration to the US. The digital revolution obviates this need for workers who are connected with their employers through computer screens and data servers, but whose work performance requires no (permanent) bodily onsite presence; as long as they are wired, they can work on computers situated anywhere in the world. The key mechanism enabling such virtual migration is what Aneesh calls the ‘rule of code’: programming languages that structure the emerging transnational labor regime. The book is divided into seven chapters. Following the introduction, Aneesh discusses the phenomenon of migration in the context of globalization, which has the tendency to subvert and surpass socially and economically arbitrary boundaries. These boundaries, in turn, are the product of processes of nation-building. The nation-state is a mechanism of social closure that creates a sharp gulf between its members and all ‘others’. Migration emerges as a problem when national enclosures rigidly demarcate groups of people from another. Prior to the existence of nation-states, people tended to migrate relatively freely, restricted mainly by technological limitations, i.e. by the available means of transportation. The nationstate erects political barriers and regulates people’s mobility according to criteria of ascribed status (e.g. citizen versus alien), perceived economic need (e.g. shortage or abundance of domestic labor), cultural match (e.g. degree of ethnic or religious ‘fit’ as determined by the prevailing collective identity), etc. People willing to migrate to the territory marked by a given state’s borders but not meeting contingent standards of ‘desirability’ face the problem of rejection (forcing them to stay outside or to move into illegality) and they become a problem from the viewpoint of insiders who want to keep them out. Economic migrants tend to compress local wages, as they increase the supply of labor. Not surprisingly, therefore,