This monograph investigates the migratory pathways and motivations of Indian immigrants in Germany, focusing on students and European Union (EU) Blue Card holders ('highly skilled' migrants), in the context of increasing white-collar migration from India to Germany. Datta's latest work builds on her decade-long engagement with this field. It offers a nuanced multi-perspectival approach to what migration scholarship has variously identified as 'motivations', 'drivers', 'push-pull factors', and 'aspirations' - the complex questions of why, and where, people move. It does so by highlighting 'shadow pathways' of migration which are often invisibilized by state categories like 'education' and 'employment', and by unraveling the multiplicities of migratory motivations through personal narratives. It also demonstrates the longer term implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on migration, and how the futural imaginaries of migrants are entangled with their experience of the pandemic as well as their choice of destination countries.