Ideal and aspiring citizens: Indian tech workers organizing in India and the United States in the context of liminal informality

Despite growing evidence of their precarity, high-income workers are mostly excluded from the literature on informal workers and their activism. Also, while informal workers—even as undocumented immigrants—mobilize discourses of citizenship in their activism, it remains unclear how citizens and documented immigrants facing de facto exclusion from citizenship organize. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and ethnography, I show how Indian tech workers’ “liminal informality” fills these gaps about class and citizenship, and affirms the global dominance of informality. I examine how these workers organize in the context of liminal informality as ideal and aspiring citizens in India and United States.