The Migration Industry and the Commercialization of International Migration

Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Ninna Nyberg Sorensen, Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Ninna Nyberg Sorensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136180880
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Migration has become business, big business. Over the last few decades a host of new business opportunities have emerged that capitalize both on the migrants' desires to migrate and the struggle by governments to manage migration. From the rapid growth of specialized transportation and labour immigration companies, to multinational companies managing detention centres or establishing border security, to the organized criminal networks profiting from human smuggling and trafficking, we are currently witnessing a growing commercialization of international migration.

This volume claims that today it is almost impossible to speak of migration without also speaking of the migration industry. Yet, acknowledging the role the migration industry plays prompts a number of questions that have so far received only limited attention among scholars and policy makers. The book offers new concepts and theory for the study of international migration by bringing together cross-disciplinary theoretical explorations and original case studies. It also provides a global coverage of the phenomena under study, covering migrant destinations in Europe, the United States and Asia, and migrant sending regions in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

1 Conceptualizing the migration industry

Rubén Hernández-León

DOI: 10.4324/9780203082737-1

• The migration industry and the migration system's cycle
• The migration industry in a field of “strange bedfellows”
• Conclusion

Migration theories have fundamentally ignored the role of the migration industry in the facilitation, regulation, control and institutionalization of international human mobility. The result is a gaping theoretical hole concerning the position, contribution and relations of profit-driven actors in the social organization of international migration. In recent years a spate of theoretical and empirical studies has begun to fill this gap. Concepts such as “migration industry,”¹ “migration merchants,”² “business of migration,”³ and “immigrant place entrepreneurs”⁴ have developed a new lexicon to theorize the actors and infrastructures that facilitate human mobility across borders. These efforts were pioneered by Robert Harney, who coined the term “commerce of migration” to refer to the ensemble of labor, transportation and money brokers facilitating Italian emigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁵ However, his brilliant contribution came on the eve of a wave of studies on immigrant social networks which, by focusing on the relations of reciprocity and solidarity among migrants, largely overlooked the role of profit-driven brokers in the social process of migration.

In this chapter, I advance the theorization of the migration industry using two well-known constructs of the process of international migration and immigration. The first of these constructs, the “migration hump,” conceptualizes the rise and decline of a migratory stream through a series of distinct stages, each influenced by identifiable socioeconomic factors.⁶ The second construct, Aristide Zolberg's “strange bedfellows of American immigration politics,” explains the positions and alliances of different actors in relation to immigration's putative economic, political and cultural effects.⁷ Both constructs recognize the role of the migration industry, but only timidly and without a full-fledged consideration of the ways in which migration entrepreneurs, corporations and profit-driven private actors participate and connect with other stakeholders in the organization of international human mobility.

I engage these two constructs of migration and immigration to argue that the migration industry and its core and peripheral members play a more significant part in structuring international human mobility than has been acknowledged by most migration theories. I also utilize the migration hump and the strange bedfellows schemes to expand my prior work conceptualizing the migration industry. So far this work has focused on the role of migration entrepreneurs as facilitators of international human mobility and brokers of services demanded by sojourners in the context of migration. Building on Castles and Miller,⁸ I have defined the migration industry as the ensemble of entrepreneurs, firms and services which, chiefly motivated by financial gain, facilitate international mobility, settlement and adaptation, as well as communication and resource transfers of migrants and their families across borders.⁹

However, the policies and practices of governments to regulate and manage migration also foster migration industries aimed at controlling and restricting cross-border mobility. For instance, Golash-Boza argues that private contractors, who “profit from massive enforcement expenditures,” form part of an immigration industrial complex functioning with a logic and dynamics similar to those of the prison and military industrial complexes.¹⁰ Historical and early sociological studies show that actors involved in migration facilitation and control have long intersected. For example, governments set up facilities at ports of embarkation and transportation hubs in order to separate out suitable and undesirable candidates for immigration. Governmental authorities rapidly realized that they could outsource some of these screenings and control tasks to steamship companies, a practice that nowadays has been extended to airlines.¹¹ Recruiters and contractors have often fulfilled dual facilitation and control functions by not only assisting but also selecting and managing immigrant workers on behalf of employers and state institutions. As the introductory chapter argues, state control and enforcement functions are today outsourced to large corporations which profit from the incarceration, transport and deportation of migrants, and from the development of surveillance technology, software and data management to screen sojourners at airports, borders and coastal ports of entry.

Scholars have also analyzed the activities of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) invested in the rescue and rehabilitation of exploited and vulnerable mobile populations as yet another kind of migration industry, the so-called “rescue industry.” Without profiting directly from either the facilitation or the control of migration, these actors have become salient players in the development of the interpretive frames and institutional infrastructures to manage particular kinds of migratory flows.¹² Although often applied to the study of so-called trafficked migrants, the notion of a non-profit rescue industry can probably be extended to the analysis of actors involved in the resettlement of refugees. I locate this rescue industry in Zolberg's scheme of “immigration allies.”

I illustrate the presence of a migration industry of facilitation, control and rescue in the migration hump and strange bedfellows theoretical constructs using contemporary and historical examples from the Mexico—United States and Central America—Mexico migratory flows. In the following section, I engage the migration hump to then analyze the migration industry in the field of “strange bedfellows of American immigration politics.” I close this essay by offering some concluding thoughts.

The migration industry and the migration system's cycle

In its simplest version the migration hump posits that the number of people involved in a given migratory flow increases over time and reaches a zenith before it declines. The hump has four distinct stages: 1 initiation, 2 takeoff, 3 stagnation, and 4 decline (see Figure 1.1). Scholars using the migration hump have been interested in the actors and mechanisms driving each stage as well as the overall “rise and demise” of the migratory cycle. Not surprisingly, different theories emphasize different, but not mutually exclusive, causal and intervening forces. For instance, network theory states that social ties are the most powerful factor spreading migratory behavior and allowing for the exponential growth of migration in the takeoff phase. In contrast, proponents of neoclassical economics might view networks as an intervening mechanism while ultimately attributing the increase in migration to wage differentials between countries. Similarly, while demographic theories might explain the decline of a migratory stream as a result of the exhaustion of the pool of emigration candidates, neoclassical economics would again explicate stage four of the migration hump as the likely outcome of wage convergence between sending and receiving areas.¹³

Figure 1.1 The migration hump Source: Adapted from Emigration transition in prewar Europe and postwar Korea, in Patterns and Processes of International Migration in the 21st Century, Douglas S. Massey, time.dufe.edu.cn/wencong/africanmigration/1Massey.pdf.

Initiation

Migration scholars have long recognized the crucial role that migration entrepreneurs play in the initial stage of the cycle: often chartered by employers and governments, recruiters, smugglers and transporters search, stimulate, guide and move migrants, effectively connecting the demand and supply of migrant labor. In the absence of previously accumulated social capital, migrants rely completely on these brokers. But what exactly is the contribution of the migration industry in the initiation phase? Or, more precisely, do recruiters cause migration or do they only facilitate it, limiting their role to building the preliminary infrastructure for international mobility?

Recruitment played a seminal role in the initial stages of Mexico—United States migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this period, enganchadores (recruiters) traveled to western Mexico to find laborers for the booming US economy. The geographic area where these labor brokers concentrated their contracting efforts went on to become Mexico's most important sending region. Although migrants soon developed individual knowledge and social networks that partly replaced the expertise of recruiters, the accumulation of migratory social capital would have been delayed for decades without the initial travails of labor agents.

As a path-dependent process, migration is shaped by decisions and events taking place in the earlier stages of its historical progression. This notion is at the heart of cumulative causation but has largely been applied to understanding how an individual's migratory trip affects future sojourners by broadening the migratory social capital of the collectivity. Using the same principle, I argue that the social capital that catapults the migration hump into a takeoff phase is fundamentally dependent on the knowledge and infrastructures deployed by recruiters in the initiation stage. Mexico—United States migration offers its own counterfactual example. In contrast to the western region of Mexico, the southeastern section of the country was untapped by recruiters and other migration entrepreneurs. As a result, Mexico's southeastern region remained the area with the lowest number of migrants bound for the United States. States located in the region, such as Veracruz and Yucatán, did not emerge as significant sending areas of US-bound migrants until the late twentieth century, and then thanks in part to the intermediation of recruiters.¹⁴

Takeoff

As mentioned above, theories and historical accounts of migration generally argue that the role of immigrant labor brokers subsides in the takeoff stage of the migration hump. Simply put, the maturation of kinship and friendship networks, the development of occupational niches and the increasing familiarity of newcomers with employment opportunities abroad make migrants less dependent on the services of recruiters.¹⁵ In his historical overview of European immigration to the United States, Bodnar contends that the brokers who played such a critical role during the initial stages of migration were soon replaced by migrant networks, which had quickly become the depositories of migratory social capital:

Friends and relatives functioned so effectively, in fact, that they invariably superseded labor agents and “middlemen” in influencing the entry of newcomers into the industrial economy and were usually able to create occupation beachheads for those that followed.¹⁶

This interpretation is not incorrect so much as it is incomplete. To be sure, migration entrepreneurs do not disappear. On the contrary, their numbers grow, but once these entrepreneurs have sufficiently stimulated the supply of emigrants, they can manage and provide services based in the country of reception. This shift in the center of gravity of the migration industry from sending to receiving locations responds to changes characteristic of the takeoff phase: namely, the expansion of the migratory stream and the growth of immigrant satellite communities abroad. In turn, the exponential growth in the number of sojourners joining the flow offers entrepreneurial opportunities to the migrants themselves, who identify such opportunities by virtue of their membership in the social networks that sustain migration. In-group membership offers the chance to commodify solidarity; that is, to use migratory human capital as well as the individual migrant's distinct position in a social network for personal monetary gain.¹⁷ This dual position as members of migratory networks and as leaders in the provision of migration-related services often allows contractors, transporters and smugglers to “blend in” (remaining invisible to authorities and even to researchers) and to take advantage of opportunities offered by the changing context of migration (i.e. increasing and shifting demand for immigrant labor). These migration entrepreneurs often begin their careers in a seemingly amateur fashion, prompted by fellow migrants and long-time employers who commission services on a casual basis.¹⁸ Still, the activities of some migration entrepreneurs might build on the networks and mobility infrastructures established by ethnic traders and contraband runners.

During the takeoff stage migration entrepreneurs find a growing clientele in the expanding immigrant settlements in the country of destination. In these settlements contractors and transporters can recruit immigrant labor, while immigrant banking, remittance and courier service providers thrive and operate intermingled with other ethnic and immigrant entrepreneurs. As the takeoff stage unfolds, mainstream businesses join this growing market of migration-related services, developing their own operational infrastructure but also partnering with ethnic migration entrepreneurs. This is the case of money transfer corporations, which become ubiquitous in immigrant neighborhoods by using ethnic grocery stores as points of sale.

States of destination respond to a growing stream and stock of immigrants by devising policies aimed at managing and controlling immigration. An unintended effect of these policies is the revitalization of migration facilitators who, working on behalf of either employers or sojourners (or both), provide the know-how and infrastructure to circumvent the obstacles raised by these policies. For instance, the introduction of employer sanctions in the US Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 revitalized the role of contractors in the United States as firms, and individua...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• abbreviation
• Introduction
• 1 Conceptualizing the migration industry
• 2 The migration industry in global migration governance
• 3 Migration trajectories and the migration industry Theoretical reflections and empirical examples from Asia
• 4 The migration industry and developmental states in East Asia
• 5 The neoliberalized state and the growth of the migration industry
• 6 The rise of the private border guard Accountability and responsibility in the migration control industry
• 7 Private security companies and the European borderscapes
• 8 Pusher stories Ghanaian connection men and the expansion of the EU's border regimes into Africa
• 9 Migration brokers and document fixers The making of migrant subjects in urban Peru
• 10 Public officials and the migration industry in Guatemala Greasing the wheels of a corrupt machine
• 11 Migration between social and criminal networks Jumping the remains of the Honduran migration train
• Index
• Routledge Global Institutions Series