ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an exclusive peek into the thought process and the personal calculus that comes to inform the KP families’ own assessment of “Migrant” policies, as shaped by their lived-in displacement experience. Given the extended absence from the Valley and with minimal hope of return, the families come to evaluate “Migrant” policies through multiple lenses, such as the economic, with a cost-benefit calculus; psychological, factoring in the mental tension that comes from dependency; and the social lens, which impacts their standing in the host community, as others view them to be freeloaders, lazy, and dishonest. The families’ assessment of policies, as shaped by the political and the community settings of their host communities, provides an extraordinary understanding of how displacement experience can come to be weighed as a “blessing in disguise” or as a "humiliation to the very being" by different families of the same community.
