Abstract: Millions of households in the developing world rely on migration to navigate economic uncertainty. While an extensive literature has examined the microeconomic and welfare effects of labor migration, its political consequences are less well understood. How does migration transform citizen-state relations and democratic governance in left behind areas?  In this paper, I develop a theory to explain how reliance on private self-insurance strategies, such as temporary economic migration, can increase political disengagement among citizens. I illustrate my argument in India, the world's largest democracy, home to an estimated 100 million internal economic migrants. To do so, I first conduct a difference-in-differences analysis of nationally representative panel data to demonstrate that household migration causes citizens to withdraw from formal democratic processes of claim-making. Specifically, members of migrant households contact local elected officials less frequently for assistance and participate in community meetings at lower rates than those in non-migrant households. Next, I present fine-grained evidence from an original survey in a high-migration corridor, showing that individuals in migrant households are systematically less likely to vote, get involved in campaign activities during local elections, and engage in political protest compared to their counterparts in non-migrant households. I explore two potential mechanisms to explain this disengagement effect. First, I find evidence suggesting that migrant remittances substitute for welfare services provided by governments and dampen the politicization of grievances, weakening incentives for political activism. Second, migration depletes households of their political spearheads, or individuals most likely to participate in politics and public life. Collectively, these findings have important implications for democratic accountability in the Global South.