The Migration Industry in Asia

Brokerage, Gender and Precarity

Michiel Baas

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9789811396939
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811396946
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

This pivot considers the emergence and functioning of the migration industry and commercialization of migration pathways in Asia. Grounded in extensive fieldwork and building on empirical data gathered through interactions and interviews with brokers, agents and other facilitators of migration, it examines the increasing co-dependence on, entanglement of and overlap between migrants, industry and state. It considers how for low-skilled migrants, migration is often not even possible without the involvement of the industry. As the opportunity to migrate has opened up to an ever-widening group of potential migrants, receiving nations have fine-tuned their migration infrastructure and programs to facilitate the inflow (and timely outflow) of the migrants it deems desirable. The migration industry plays an active role as mediator between migrants' desires and states' requirements. This pivot focuses on what unites sending and receiving sides of migration, going beyond presupposed established networks, and offering a clear conceptualization of the contemporary migration industry in Asia.

© The Author(s) 2020

M. Baas (ed.)The Migration Industry in Asiahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9694-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Brokerage, Gender and Precarity in Asia’s Migration Industry

Michiel Baas¹

(1)

National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

Michiel Baas

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In recent years, there has been a gradual realization that migration cannot solely be understood by focusing on either sending or receiving side. Although increasingly studies of migration take a multi-sited approach, following migrants across the border and from migration decision to ongoing trajectories, an actual focus on what unites sending and receiving sides remains relatively understudied. Studies of transnationalism have partly stepped into this void by showing how various networks act as facilitators and lubricators of migrant flows, but often continue to presuppose an established network, an active diaspora and a certain history to a particular flow of migrants from A to B. However, research increasingly indicates that migrants in Asia no longer strictly rely on such networks and established migrant communities. Due to the commercialization of migration pathways (Baas 2007; Garapich 2008; Lindquist et al. 2010, 11; Surak 2017, 2), the opportunity to migrate has opened up to an ever-widening group of potential migrants. Furthermore, the ongoing formalization and regulation of migration trajectories (Faist 2014; Spaan and Hillmann 2013; Kern and Müller-Böker 2015) also makes that increasingly migrants have no choice but to seek out the services of specialist in order to meet stringent rules and regulations. The emergence of a migration industry across Asia needs to be understood in this light.

While research on the migration industry has increased in recent years, most notably following the lead of scholars such as Garapich (2008), Lindquist (2010), and Hernández-León (2008, 2013), there continues to be a lack in empirically rich studies that take the existence of the migration industry as a starting point in order to derive at a deeper understanding of its role in facilitating migration. In particular, its practical, day-to-day functioning remains understudied. A particular problem here is the ongoing demonization of the migration industry (McKeown 2008; Lindquist 2015), which, although not always altogether unjustified, has a tendency to reduce its functioning to the experience of exploitation while glossing over how, especially for low-skilled migrants in Asia, migration is often not even possible without the involvement of agents, brokers and others that make up the industry.

This edited volume brings together a selection of papers which were initially presented at a two-day workshop titled ‘The Migration Industry: Facilitators and Brokerage in Asia’, held at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore in 2017. Each of these papers are deeply grounded in extensive fieldwork, building on empirical data gathered through interactions and interviews with brokers, agents and other facilitators of migration. While the experience of migrants with the industry is certainly not disregarded here as well, the papers take a particularly critical approach to migration policy, adjustments and interventions. The picture that emerges from these papers is revealing for the increasing co-dependence on, entanglement of and overlap between migrants, the industry and the state (of receiving as well as sending nation). While migrants are strikingly dependent on the industry for making migration possible, migrants are also involved in the industry themselves, sometimes even envisioning it as a pathway by itself: from migrant to agent or broker. While rules and regulations fuel the need for the migration industry, the state is also dependent on it for the inflow of the right type of migrant. Moreover, the state is actively part in formalizing the industry’s role in migration trajectories. While the industry itself depends on the migration desires of its clients, it also plays an active role in fuelling migration desires and creating new pathways. In the following two sections, I will briefly engage with two interlinked questions: What Is the Migration Industry, and What Is Lacking in the analysis of its functioning (in Asia) so far? In the final section, I will show how the various chapters in this volume provide important insight here.

What Is the Migration Industry?

Since the 1970s, there has been a steady increase in the use of labour recruitment agencies facilitating migration to Asia and the Middle East (Lindquist 2010, 123, drawing on Massey et al. 1998). As a term itself, the migration industry can be traced to 1977 when it was initially termed ‘the commerce of migration’, which was held to refer to the activities of a set of intermediaries who profited by offering services to migrants (as discussed in Lindquist 2010). Twenty years later, Salt and Stein would speak of ‘a global business’ when it comes to the migration industry. Scholars such as Robin Cohen (1997) noted that ‘despite the rigorous official control of immigration, there has been an extensive and rapid development of a migration industry comprising private lawyers, travel agents, recruiters, organizers, fixers and brokers who sustain links with origin and destination countries’ (Cohen 1997, 163). It was not until 2007 that the term became more commonplace among researchers working on various topics related to migration (e.g. Baas 2007). However, it was particularly Garapich’s work on Polish migrants in the EU that set the tone for further conceptualization on the migration industry. Garapich positioned the industry as a ‘particular sector of the service economy that stimulates mobility and eases adaptation’ (Garapich 2008, 735). Understanding what constitutes the migration industry and how it can be defined remains a topic of debate among scholars however. Various reasons can be pointed at for this.

First of all, there is the terminology itself: while some speak of migration management, brokers and agents, others use terms such migration merchants or subcontractors (e.g. Kyle and Liang 2001). Through such usage a certain divide percolates that distinguishes between legal and illegal migration, the latter mainly referring to practices of trafficking and illegal border crossings while the former is assumed to function within the narrow confines of local and overseas’ rules and regulations. The most widely encountered definition is the one by Hernández-León who speaks of the migration industry in terms of an ‘ensemble of entrepreneurs who, motivated by the pursuit of financial gain, provide a variety of services facilitating human mobility across international borders’ (see also Hernández-León 2013, 25). In his view, it is the migration industry that greases the engines of international migration (2008, 154). It does so by providing and articulating the expertise and infrastructural resources needed for cross-border movements (see also Nyberg Sørensen and Gammeltoft-Hansen 2013, 6). While other scholars have attempted to refine earlier mentioned definitions, the primary discussion has focused on which businesses and actors can be included under this particular umbrella header (e.g. Betts 2013; Light 2013). Fine-tuning the understanding of the migration industry, Nyberg Sørensen and Gammeltoft-Hansen (2013) expand it to include not just service providers that make migration possible but also those so-called control providers such as private contractors performing immigration checks, operating detention centres and/or carrying out forced returns (p. 6). In their analysis of the actors that make up the migration industry, they note the following ones: larger, often transnationally operating companies; agencies and companies facilitating legal migration (sometimes even undocumented); smaller enterprises, typically set up by migrants who have managed to commercialize their own knowledge/experience; clandestine actors (e.g. human smuggling networks, transnational crime organizations, trafficking rings); and finally (the increasing number of) NGOs, humanitarian organizations and migrant associations (pp. 8–10).

What Is Lacking?

Although recent studies and publications by Spaan and Hillmann (2013), Kern and Müller-Böker (2015), Surak (2017), and Cranston et al. (2018) have significantly contributed to the conceptualization of the migration industry, what continues to be lacking is scholarship that engages more empirically driven with the way the migration industry functions on a day-to-day basis. The earlier mentioned demonization or vilification remains an issue here. As Kern and Müller-Böker (2015, 158) note, besides the usual bad practices and fraud cases, ‘recruiters perform important roles for the facilitation of transnational mobility and present the necessary infrastructure for labour migration’. Moreover, it could be argued that the industry even plays an important role in making migration safer. ‘Brokers are important facilitators in supporting alternative income strategies and new livelihood options for people’ (ibid.). Finally, the migration industry seems to play an increasingly important role in migration governance itself.

When Lindquist et al. (2010) suggested to think of that middle space that connects sending and receiving nations as a ‘black box’ which migration research had a task to pry open in order to understand its functioning, they argued that a focus on brokers is a productive way of doing so. We follow this call here by presenting a selection of papers which do exactly that. By focusing directly on agents, brokers and other commercial and non-commercial actors involved in facilitating migration, the chapters that follow draw attention to the necessity of their involvement, the constraints faced and the risks taken (by migrants as well as the industry itself).

This Volume

This edited volume focuses on three key elements which provide for a deeper understanding of the functioning of the migration industry across Asia: brokerage, gender and precarity. Brokerage is utilized here as a shorthand for all these activities that agents (brokers) and others involved in the migration industry are involved in to drive, facilitate and regulate migration. The chapters presented in this volume all engage with various aspects of brokerage, especially in the way policy implementations and adjustments, often specifically meant to protect low-skilled migrants, give rise to various forms of brokerage and the involvement of a migration industry in general. We see gender as an increasingly important aspect i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Brokerage, Gender and Precarity in Asia’s Migration Industry
• 2. Precarity, Migration and Brokerage in Indonesia: Insights from Ethnographic Research in Indramayu
• 3. Brokered (Il)legality: Co-producing the Status of Migrants from Myanmar to Thailand
• 4. Understanding the Cost of Migration: Facilitating Migration from India to Singapore and the Middle East
• 5. Unauthorized Recruitment of Migrant Domestic Workers from India to the Middle East: Interest Conflicts, Patriarchal Nationalism and State Policy
• 6. An Industry of Frauds? State Policy, Migration Assemblages and Nursing Professionals from India
• Back Matter