Migration industries around the nexus of mobility, immobility and settlement. An overview

Abstract

This introduction aims to give a brief overview of research on the migration industries, based on our definition of the migration industry as all those eco-nomic and financial activities developing between people on the move and the border, we categorise the literature that focuses on this topic around the nexus of mobility, immobility and settlement. We suggest reading and interpreting the research along three main dimensions, depending on where migration in-dustry actors intervene in the relationship between people on the move and the border: a migration industry that facilitates mobility and border crossing and involves actors ranging from smuggling networks to global recruitment agen-cies; an immobility migration industry that involves state and private actors aiming to regulate and/or control the movement of people; and a migration in-dustry that is not concerned with the journey itself, but with the settlement of migrants. Various migration industry actors are present in all these stages, re-configuring their roles, shifting their activities, and responding to new and dis-tinct opportunities for/of the commodification and commercialisation of mi-gration. For these reasons, as will be argued in the introduction to this mono-graph issue, the notion of industries rather than a single industry better reflects the variety of actors and activities operating between migrant agency and border along the different stages of migration projects.