Conceptualizing the migration industry

Abstract

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.5However, 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 industryusing twowell-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 migrationindustry, but only timidly and without a full-fledged consideration of the ways in which migration entrepreneurs, corporations and profitdriven 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 arguethat 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