Abstract: Millions of households in the developing world rely on migration to navigate economic uncertainty. While an extensive body of research has examined the economic and welfare effects of these labor flows, their political consequences are largely overlooked. In this paper, I develop a theory to explain how reliance on private self-insurance strategies, such as temporary economic migration, can lead citizens to disengage from politics. 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 demand-making. Specifically, members of migrant households contact local elected officials less frequently to seek help with a problem and participate in community meetings at lower rates than those in non-migrant households. Next, I use fine-grained evidence from an original survey in a high-migration corridor in Eastern India to show that individuals in migrant households are systematically less likely to vote and engage in political protest compared to their counterparts in non-migrant households. These findings suggest that migrant remittances substitute for welfare services provided by governments and dampen the politicization of grievances.