Sophie Cranston - Exploring the Migration Industries: New Perspectives on Facilitating and Constraining Migration

This book concentrates on the role of commercialized intermediary actors in migration. It seeks to understand how these actors shape migration and mobility patterns through the services they offer. In addressing the role that migration industries play in migration, the book uses diverse examples such as labour market brokers and recruitment agencies from Eastern Europe to the United Kingdom; Latvian migration to Norway; super-rich lifestyle brokers; international students agents; the Global Mobility Industry for corporate expatriates; skilled migrant intermediaries; and those providing services to West African migrants coming to Europe or Indonesians leaving for Malaysia. Through these examples, the contributors examine the actors in migration industries, showing how they respond to and shape migration trends. They also consider how migration industries operate, manoeuvre and interact with government policy on migration management. Finally, the book looks at how migration industries enable certain forms of migration through enticement, facilitation and control, translating into specific migration trajectories and im/mobility. Providing examples from across the world, this book analyses how charities, businesses, sub-contractors, informal recruitment agencies, and other actors help to shape migration processes, and it will be of interest to those studying not only the causes of migration, but also the migration process itself. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.