Q.Migration of people within the country is often resisted by locals. What contributions could migrants make to local economy?

Migrants moving within a country are often seen as threats by local residents, even though they are still fellow citizens with equal rights to live and work anywhere in the country. …

Freedom of movement is one of the rights citizens have in most democracies, and it matters especially for workers, since labour tends to move to wherever jobs exist — I.T. workers moving to cities like Bangalore, nurses from Kerala working across the country, or construction workers following infrastructure projects. But such movement is frequently resisted by local populations: resentment can build when jobs go to 'outsiders' at lower wages, when political parties take up demands to reserve jobs for people from the state or who speak the local language, and in extreme cases resistance has taken the form of organised violence against migrants.

Despite this resistance, migrants make real, substantial contributions to the local economy. Skilled migrants fill genuine shortages — the I.T. and healthcare examples above show how entire local industries can depend on workers who came from elsewhere. But the contribution of poorer, informal-sector migrant workers is just as real, even though society is often less welcoming toward them than toward skilled migrants. A useful way to see this is to imagine a single day in an urban middle-class household with no migrant workers around at all — no help with cooking, cleaning, childcare, driving, or the small informal services that keep households and neighbourhoods running smoothly; the resulting chaos makes the point that migrant labour is woven into the local economy far more deeply than the 'outsiders taking local jobs' framing usually admits. …