The Migration Industry: The Migration Industry: Charting the Relations of Charting the Relations of Facilitators, Control and Facilitators, Control and

Rescue Actors in Rescue Actors in International MigrationInternational Migration

Rubén Hernández-LeónDept. of Sociology

UCLA

The Migration IndustryThe Migration Industry

The MI is the ensemble of entrepreneurs, firms and services which, motivated by financial gain, facilitate international mobility, settlement and communication and resource transfers across borders.

The specific activities, services and entrepreneurs that make up the MI comprise a sphere with changing boundaries, depending on state policies, the stage of the migratory cycle, the types and volume of migration and political and economic circumstances.

The Migration Industry The Migration Industry

State sponsored recruiters

Large remittance firms Travel agencies Immigration lawyers Formal transportation

companies Real estate promoters

Smugglers Illegal recruiters Informal transporters Loan sharks Notary publics Fake document

providers Couriers, viajeros, remesadores

The Migration IndustryThe Migration Industry

The MI arises from the geopolitical and communication discontinuities imposed by states and their borders, which translate into barriers to mobility, transfer of resources and information.

It is the existence of borders and other forms of state organized closure that constitute the raison d’être of the MI.

But borders are also the places where the MI (actor and infrastructures) is concentrated.

The Other Migration The Other Migration Industries Industries

Other migration industries are present at borders:

The industry of control: prisons, border surveillance, deportations.

The ‘rescue’ industry: NGOs vested with ‘saving,’ rehabilitating and resettling migrants.

A bastard industry of control: trafficking, kidnapping and extortion.

Conceptualizing the Conceptualizing the Migration Industry Migration Industry

The MI should be theorized and analyzed as part of a larger social and organizational field that includes other key actors of the process of migration.

Theories of international migration tend to ignore the MI or to subsume it under other actors and institutions: facilitators are a migrant institution or migrant social capital.

Conceptualizing the Conceptualizing the Migration Industry Migration Industry

Making us of an existing conceptualization: Zolberg’s Strange Bedfellows of American Immigration Politics.

Charts the unusual alliances of the actors that favor and oppose immigration on either economic or cultural-political terms.

Scheme can be used as an initial template to chart relations, articulations, movements.

Charting relations: Charting relations: facilitators, control, rescue facilitators, control, rescue

actorsactors

Present elements:MI is a distinct and autonomous actor.MI occupies distinct position in a field.Relations can be inferred from position.Polity as field where interactions occur.

Missing elements:The movement of actors between and within quadrants.Suggests but does not include all actors (i.e. rescue & control industry).Focused on immigration,not emigration or IM (what happens outside state).

Figure 2. The Migration Industry in the ‘Strange Bedfellows’ of American Immigration PoliticsSource: Adapted from The ‘Strange Bedfellows’ of American Immigration Politics, in Aristide R. Zolberg, "Matters of State: Theorizing Immigration Policy," in The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, ed. Charles Hirschman, P. Kasinitz, and J. DeWind (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), 71-93.

Co-Ethnics Putative Cosmopolitans Cultural/Effects ++

Employers Native Workers Transporters Local AuthoritiesPutative Economic ++ ----Effects

Traditional Nationalists __

Immigrationist

Coalitions

Restricti

onist

Coalitions

Control Industry

Migration Industry of Facilitation

‘Rescue’ Industry

Charting relations: Charting relations: facilitators, control and facilitators, control and

rescue actorsrescue actors Upper left quadrant:- Employers closely

aligned with MI. Often, undistinguishable.

- Co-ethnics and immigrants with privileged access to MI.

- But also cosmopolitans working in NGOs.

Outline of rescue industry: when NGOs members commoditize information.

Local authorities & unions move to left quadrant & become tolerant of migrants & MI.

Charting relations: Charting relations: facilitators, control and facilitators, control and

rescue actorsrescue actors Control industry coalesce with politicians that

push an agenda to restrict migration. Control industry benefits from the continuation

of migration but also from massive expenditures to deter and control migration.

Advocates but also former government officials are able to use knowledge to become facilitators OR employees of the control industry.

Rescue industry actors can become facilitators but also subcontractors of control functions.

Charting relations: Charting relations: facilitators, control and facilitators, control and

rescue actorsrescue actors

Representatives of foreign governments (the migrants’ countries of origin) who build political-economic alliances with facilitators and rescue actors.

In sending, transit and destination countries, state actors establish a variety of relations with the bastard industry of control (mafias, cartels, trafficking and extortion rings).

ConclusionsConclusions

MI of facilitation, control and rescue do not exist in a sociopolitical vacuum but are part of larger field of actors and institutions with which they establish relations, alliances and organic articulations.

A migration industry lens shows that politically ‘strange bedfellows’ might be economically familiar bedmates linked through subtle and undetected moves.