New directions in exploring the migration industries: introduction to special issue

ABSTRACT

This Special Issue explores the directions through which we can take research on the migration industries. In this introduction, we review existing research on migration industries to look at how this explores questions on how migration industries foster, assist and constrain migration. In doing so, we argue that these questions have primarily been approached from three different perspectives: structuralist, labour market and mobilities, but these perspectives often speak past rather than to one another. In highlighting how these approaches can work together, the question that the Special Issue explores becomes how do the migration industries function and when/where/how do they intersect with other domains of migration. In highlighting the contributions that each paper in the special issue makes to answering this question, we show how an understanding of the migration industries is not just a research field in itself, but can strengthen our understanding of migration.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration industries
• mobility industry
• migration facilitation
• migration infrastructure

Migration industries work to shape mobility patterns and mobile identities through the services that they offer (Cranston 2016), from before migrants move (Alpes 2012), to their journeys abroad (Spaan and Hillmann 2013), and after they have arrived (Glick-Schiller 2009). As part of a growing rise in non-state intervention into migration, they are operated by, among others, charities, businesses, sub-contractors and informal agencies. Together the services offered by migration industries contribute to an intensified transnational character of the facilitation as well as control of migration (Nyberg-Sørensen 2012).

Through this special issue, we argue that a focus on migration industries allows us not only to gain empirical insights into the mechanisms by and through which people move, it also provides us with an analytical lens to better unpack the social, economic and geographical complexities of migration processes. Beyond this, understanding the migration industries helps us understand contemporary articulations of the interactions between the economy, nation states, non-governmental organisations and the movement of people. An examination of the migration industries not only tell us about the commercialisation of migration, but how we can move beyond the methodological and conceptual logics of the nation-state (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2002) by investigating business networks and in/formal institutions that specialise in transcending borders. To do so, we seek to bring together a fragmented set of research that loosely researches processes associated with the migration industries (e.g. Andersson 2014; Cranston 2016; Gammeltoft-Hansen and Nyberg-Sørensen 2013; Garapich 2008; Hernández León 2008; Lindquist 2010; Nyberg-Sørensen 2012; Spaan 1994; Xiang and Lindquist 2014) to further develop the ways in which migration industries can be considered a field of research (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Nyberg-Sørensen 2013)

Within this set of literature, there has been a variety of terminology used to describe the actors involved within migration ‘industries’, such as ‘business’ or ‘infrastructure’. For example, in thinking about trafficking, Salt and Stein (1997) highlighted the ways in which migration can be seen as ‘business’, arguing for a need to think about the actors involved in the ‘institutionalized networks with complex profit and loss accounts, including a set of institutions, each of which stands to make a commercial gain’ (468). However, it has also been argued that due to the different ways in which actors work to facilitate and control migration, this means that the term ‘infrastructure’ is more appropriate than ‘industry’: ‘migration industry primarily constructs migration as a form of business and pays less attention to the fact that migration brokers are not simply selling opportunities for migrating overseas, but are also dealing with various components of infrastructure’ (Xiang and Lindquist 2014, S133). However, we see the ‘dealing with infrastructure’ also as a migration industry, that is ‘industry’ captures the ways in which the processes of migration become an economy; the production and circulation of knowledge, the offering of services and so on. One could challenge the notion that intermediaries offer their services for monetary returns only; services and resources are exchanged, for example, for prestige of political support as well (Faist 2014; Spaan 1999). As to the scope of migration industry, this is predominantly defined as encompassing the facilitation and control of migration, rendering services related to the various phases of (voluntary or forced) migration, from mobilising resources for the actual migration, services needed to circumvent regulatory barriers to crossing borders or for settling in at destinations. Migration industry however performs broader functions, for example, enticement (Spaan and Van Naerssen 2018; Beech 2018), promotion of cosmopolitan lifestyles (Koh and Wissink 2018) but also market expansion through knowledge creation on migration and migrants (Cranston 2018). In this way, we adopt Spener’s (2009) understanding of migration industries as a figure of speech to describe the ‘ensemble’ (Hernández León 2008, 2013) of actors and actions involved. We argue that it is the labour involved in managing, facilitating and controlling migration that makes this an industry. The ways in which we see the involvement of non-profit social networks (see Garapich 2008) means we cannot simply understand this as a business.

The prominence of the discussions of the terminology used to describe the migration industries shows that this is an emerging field. The existing work on migration industries highlights a lack of detailed understanding of the migration industries, a ‘gaping theoretical hole concerning the position, contribution and relations of profit-driven actors in the social organization of international migration’ (Hernández León 2013, 24). This absence contributes to a dearth in our understanding about how migration industries intersect with migration, what has been described as the ‘black box’ in migration research (Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh 2012). In this introductory paper, we take up these gaps within the literature to explore what the migration industries are, how migration industries work and how they relate to other dimensions of migration facilitation and migration control. In the next section, we examine the field of research on migration industries and how it intersects with other developments in the study of migration. We argue that these approaches look to understand migration industries by exploring the question: how is migration fostered, constrained, shaped and assisted? In looking at how this question comes to be answered from three perspectives – structuralist, labour market and mobilities approaches – we argue that although these approaches have the potential to highlight the intersections between migration and migration industries, in speaking past one another they often miss the larger, more important questions. Instead, we argue that in conversation, the question that migration industries researchers can address is: how do the migration industries function and when/where/how do they intersect with other domains of migration. How this special issue addresses these questions will be the focus of the final section.

Structrualist approaches

Firstly, from a structuralist approach, scholars have explored the commercialisation of migration – how migration is mediated by businesses as diverse as brokers, security companies, transporters and recruitment agencies (Gammeltoft-Hansen 2013; Nyberg-Sørensen 2012; Spaan 1994). It is from this literature that we get the notion of ‘migration industry’ where attempts are made to address the scope and complexity of the phenomenon as highlighted above. It is, however, less well understood how these commercial actors relate to other facilitators of migration, for example, ‘the social networks’ of migrants or the State. In how far should migration industry be considered functionally and conceptually separate from migrants’ social networks? Is migration industry to be seen as meso-level structure, connecting migrants and institutions at national and international level?

Evidently, international migration is a time-consuming and costly endeavour, given the spatial, juridical, economic and social barriers, and required access to resources. These include tangible and intangible assets, such as land or information, that can be transformed into capital. Included within this are second order resources (Boissevain 1974), that is, access to strategic actors that control needed resources. Social capital, accrued through social networks, thus facilitates access to resources needed for furthering ones aims, such as migration. Social capital has been defined as ‘resources embedded in a social structure which are accessed and/or mobilized in purposive actions’ (Lin 1999, 35). Investing in social networks is assumed to result in some form of (expected) return, such as jobs (Lin 2001, 19–21). The crucial role of networks, built on reciprocal ties of kinship, co-ethnicity or community, for fostering migration has been convincingly argued (Lomnitz 1977; MacDonald and MacDonald 1974; Massey et al. 1987). However, social network theory fails to sufficiently take into account the wide range of other actors and institutions, external to the migrant's personal network, that impact on the migration process (Krissman 2005). Within migrant social networks commercialised, bureaucratic transactions replace or work alongside reciprocal relations. Harney (1977), studying Italian migration to North America in the early twentieth century, showed how migrants, lacking sufficient knowledge and skills, turn to intermediaries for transport, required documentation and money. These brokers, embedded in migrant communities, seek out migrants for profit, hence the term ‘commerce of migration,’ what Salt and Stein (1997, 468) later referred to the global migration business. In highlighting how migration is structured, they expanded the scope of actors and institutions that facilitate migration, but restricted the conceptual boundary to those that gain commercially from engaging with migration. However, as Goss and Lindquist (1995, 336) argued, a routinisation of social practice related to migration evolves, reflecting goals of individual and institutional agents. They advocate the mid-level concept of migrant institutions, as having more explanatory power than social networks. Hugo (1996) and Castles, de Haas, and Miller (2013), utilising the term migration industry, similarly position it as meso-structure, mediating between the micro-level social networks and the state level and international institutions shaping migration flows, through policy and political economy. However, this structure is not fixed, but may appear to the migrant as rather fluid (Schapendonk 2018).

Therefore, the migration industries literature shows us that while migrants rely on their networks for mobilising resources for the actual migration and for gaining access to housing and jobs at destination, it is the migration industries’ role in negotiating of borders that is pivotal, within the context of restrictive migration policies and border control. Some studies have focused on the illegal dimension, that is, the human smuggling industry (Kyle and Koslowski 2001; Laczko and Thompson 2000; Spener 2004); however, a more comprehensive approach to migration industry shows a structural interweaving of the informal and formal in migration facilitation and control. An ever expanding range of migration intermediaries, function within and without the legal structures set up by the State (Hugo 1996). This literature shows us that if we accept the premise that migration industry centres on the commodification of migration, the preconditions for its evolving are neo-liberalism favouring free market for services and a public governance structure characterised by opening up opportunities for private business and out-sourcing of public functions in migration management and control. Governments have deliberately shifted certain functions and services toward private entities to rationalise governance and externalise costs and risks related to the matching of supply and demand for migrant labour (Menz 2013). Simultaneously, the post 9/11 world and current refugee crises has fostered policies of securitisation of the nation-state and stricter migration regulation and control (Lemberg-Pedersen 2013). The ensuing barriers to migration have created a demand for services aimed at surmounting such barriers, services that are sanctioned by government or take on a more illegal form–Nyberg Sørensen and Gammeltoft-Hansen (2013, 6–7) defined migration industry as ‘the array of non-state actors who provide services that facilitate, constrain or assist international migration’. However, cases of collusion between brokers and state representatives facilitating migration flows (Lindquist 2010; Spaan 1999), calls for inclusion of public sector actors in the conceptualisation of migration industry. Faist (2014, 44–45) rightly points out that the State (as well as civil society) is involved in labour brokerage, in line with a broader conceptualisation of migration industry as the ‘various public and private agencies and actors [that] provide for such information, products and services relating to migration, thereby promoting, facilitating and organizing the process of migration’ (Spaan and Hillmann 2013, 64).

To conclude this section, research from a structuralist approach suggests that commercialisation as juxtaposed to reciprocity and solidarity seems to be a defining criterion for what constitutes migration industry. Within social networks sustaining migration, solidarity is commodified, when actors capitalise on their in-group membership and position, by providing migration services for monetary gain (Hernández León 2013, 29). Migration industry has evolved into a global business, encompassing professional private and public entities, but also intermediaries, with varying degrees of professionalism, emanating from social networks, be it friends, relatives or other community members (Lindquist 2010; Spaan 1994). Moving on from this, we can see that migration industry and social networks are not substitutes, but, are rather entwined and operate simultaneously, as manifested in the cooperation of recruitment agencies with individuals acting as informal sub-agents within migrant social networks (Harvey, Groutsis and van den Broek 2018; Spaan and Van Naerssen 2018).

Labour market intermediaries

Research that looks at labour migration has explored the role that labour market brokers play in ‘channelling’ this form of migration (Groutsis, van den Broek, and Harvey 2015; McCollum and Findlay 2015). This is what others have described as being a way into understanding the ‘black box’ of studies in migration where the focus becomes not the experiences or mapping of migration, but ‘how mobility is made possible and organized by brokers, most notably in the process of recruitment and documentation’ (Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh 2012, 9). The primary focus here is on the facilitation of migration processes, how intermediaries help to move migrants as opposed to processes of bordering that other approaches focus on. The role that migration plays within labour markets has been the subject of academic attention for as long as migration for work has been the subject of popular anxiety on a spectrum of the availability of jobs, wages, brain drain and global talent. Set within neoclassical ‘push-pull’ discussions of migration, this research focused on ‘the factors that encourage and discourage the movement of economically active people between countries’ (Boyle and Halfcree 1998, 83). We can quite clearly see that migration industries act as a factor within the movement of labour forces, both legal and illegal (Salt and Stein 1997). Scholars who look at migration industries from a labour market perspective draw primarily upon two bodies of work.

First, research looking at labour market intermediaries – temporary staffing agencies, contractors, recruitment agents, headhunters – highlighted the role that these industries play in the structuring and experiences of contemporary labour markets. For example, from a Marxist perspective, research on temporary staffing agencies showed the relationship between employers, the outside companies that staffing was outsourced to, and the workers themselves, in how they produced an insecure, flexible workforce (Peck, Theodore, and Ward 2005). Other research focused more on the selection of employees by headhunters, looking at how elite power structures reproduce themselves (Faulconbridge et al. 2009).

Second, research that looks at migration also looked at the role that labour market ‘brokers’, ‘intermediaries’ or ‘agents’ play in ‘channelling’ labour migration decisions, again ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors. The idea of channels was derived by research looking at different ways by which Scottish emigrants moved abroad, identifying internal labour markets of MNCs, international recruitment agencies and other mechanisms (Findlay and Garrick 1990). Channels then were described in character as ‘by channelling information and resources, hav[ing] an influence in moulding the process of international migration’ (Findlay and Li 1998, 682). This work therefore represented an important shift in thinking about migration, with the use of channels being used in work that seeks to move beyond individual accounts of why people migrate, to look at the role that (global) networks play within this (e.g. Poli 2010). However, with some exceptions, the research carried out in this area focused on the social networks that worked to facilitate migration. As Ryan et al. (2008) highlight, migrant’s social networks are complex, taking on different forms such as friendship groups or community centres, carrying out roles from childcare, to emotional support, to help finding work.

These sets of research were both asking similar questions about the role that institutions play in structuring labour markets and labour market outcomes. For migrants who move for work, these institutions are those that we can call the migration industries. What this presented then was a shift in the scale of understanding migration industries, one that looked to explore the ways in which the demand and supply of migrant labour is produced and facilitated. To date, we can see two key sets of research that have brought these considerations together. First, Lindquist in looking at private recruitment brokers that facilitate migration from Indonesia to Asia and the Middle East examines ‘how mobility is made possible and organized by brokers, most notably in the process of recruitment and documentation’ (Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh 2012, 9), illustrating the ways in which local, national (state) and global processes intersect together to produce labour market outcomes (Lindquist 2010). Second, Findlay, McCollum and other’s research on A8 migration to the U.K., which illustrates both how ‘migration industries’ work to structure labour migration patterns (Findlay and McCollum 2013) and also migrant identities (Findlay et al. 2013). This latter research project is also presented in the McCollum and Findlay paper in this special issue.

Therefore, although research on migration industries from a labour market perspective is still somewhat piecemeal, we can see that it makes two key contributions to our understandings of migration industries. First, it moves us beyond looking solely at the role that labour market intermediaries play in the structuring of migration patterns, to looking at how migrant identities are produced in different ways through migration industries, from representations to practices (Beech 2014; Cranston 2016; Shubin, Findlay, and McCollum 2014). Second, it includes migrant ‘infrastructures’: other domains of migration such as people, networks and institutions that are not necessarily directed by profit. However, in opening up these other lines of theoretical and empirical research, questions still specifically remain about the function of migration industries themselves: how and why do migration labour market intermediaries operate? These are questions that are taken up by the papers by Harvey, Groutsis and van den Broek (2018); McCollum and Findlay (2018) and Žabko, Aasland and Endresen (2018).

Migration industries and im/mobilities

The third development is that which draws upon the mobilities turn (Cresswell 2006, 2010; Ernste, Martens, and Schapendonk 2012; Sheller and Urry 2006), which challenges sedentarist understandings of the social and sees migration as being a journey that is produced on the move, but not necessarily bound up by discrete beginnings and ends (Mainwaring and Brigden 2016; Schrooten, Salazar, and Dias 2016). This literature is in part directed by research that explores what happens on the move as a way by which we can understand how the meaning of mobility is produced (Cresswell 2006), but also controlled (Glick-Schiller and Salazar 2013). Importantly, this literature works to reconceptualise how we understand migration, highlighting how it is an ongoing process rather than an event (Schapendonk and Steel 2014).

This strand of debate has resulted in at least two important openings for research on migration industries. The first is rather empirical and implies a move beyond a focus on the facilitation of traditional forms of labour migration towards a focus on more flexible forms of movement. As King (2015, 2369) noted recently, there are many other space-time rhythms of movements that challenge our conventional notion of migration, such as student and lifestyle-related mobility. Moreover, migrants that have reached their destinations may be involved in onward movements (Van Liempt 2011) return visits (Ley and Kobayashi 2005) and transnational practices (Sinatti and Horst 2014) that require other forms of facilitation and are subjected to other forms of control. To understand our world on the move, we need to be sensitive to the multiple mobility processes and the actors and networks that facilitate them. This may eventually result in a semantic shift from ‘migration industry’ towards ‘mobility industry’, as is also argued by Koh and Wissink (2018). The fact that all these human mobilities deviate from the prototypical long-term immigrant, encourages us to think about what Allison Hui calls ‘migrant exceptionalism’. This notion points to the assumption that migrants are somehow ‘extraordinary mobile subjects, discrete from other (concurrent) subject positions and central units within methodologies’ (Hui 2016, 10).

The second opening for migration industry literature is conceptual as it concerns the fact that mobilities studies are particularly sensitive to the power dynamics and differentiated meanings attached to human movement. With this starting point, a focus on migration industries enables us to gain vital insights related to the question why some people are able to transcend borders, while others remain involuntarily immobile in their countries of origin (Carling 2002) or get stuck in transit (Collyer 2007). As stated by Faist (2014), brokerage creates and perpetuates power asymmetries and social inequalities. Moreover, it helps us to understand how the migration industry provokes different experiences of mobility, as well as immobility, across lines of class, legal status, age and gender (Conlon 2011). In relation to this, there exists an increasing number of studies that empirically focus on the migrant journey, most notably on the perilous journeys of irregular migrants and asylum seekers (e.g. Belloni 2016; Khosravi 2011; Mainwaring and Brigden 2016; Schapendonk and Steel 2014). These studies underline that mobility processes may include multiple thresholds (Van der Velde and Van Naerssen 2015) as well as multiple forms of facilitation and control. In the same light, there are calls to concentrate on the materialities of the journeys themselves, including the transportation mechanisms used by migrants and their facilitators (Burrell 2008; Walters 2015). This is not only important to relate the migration industry to the actual travel experiences they produce, but also because vehicles are ‘mobile zones of governance and contestation’ (Walters 2015, 5). This mix of differentiated mobility experiences, materialities and governance is inherently intertwined with the business of bordering, which may on its turn form a highly mobile landscape (Andersson 2014; see Schapendonk 2018).

Thus, instead of focusing on single actors that facilitate the moments of departure or arrival of migrants, the mobility turn invites us to follow carefully the dynamics of facilitation and control during mobility processes. In so doing, we become sensitive to the ways how identities, aspirations and travel needs may shift along the path of movement, and how this creates new markets for migration facilitation and control. Furthermore, we gain further insights into the question of how migrant’s mobility processes are impacted by the various ways different actors of facilitation and control liaise, bypass each other, or work in a continuum of practices. This helps us to move away from the notion that the migration industry exists of clearly demarcated and static sub-domains, separating state actors from brokering services and non-profit actors (see also Spaan and Van Naerssen, 2018).

Migration industries, migration and new directions

This short review of literature on institutions that can be considered the migration industries illustrates the diversity and complexity of the ways in which different aspects of different types of migration can be commercialised. This is a point that we take forward in this special issue. The migrants that feature in this special issue are Indonesian, Latvian, Indian, African and East European labour migrants moving to or in Malaysia, Norway, Italy and the U.K.; they are the transnational super-rich in China; the corporate expatriate, students and asylum seekers. We see them at different stages of the migration process, negotiating whether to move or being ‘dealt’ with as their migration is undesirable to the host state.

This means the migration industries that feature in this special issue are also similarly diverse, they are facilitators and controllers of migration processes, they have been outsourced by the state, they act to produce knowledge about migration and they work to reproduce certain lifestyles. In this way, we argue that we cannot be prescriptive when thinking about the contours and limits about what constitutes the industry of migration industries. Therefore, this issue shows that instead of trying to singularly define what the migration industries are, the more productive question is to ask what work does an understanding of migration industries do? The special issue looks at how we can answer these questions from three different, although overlapping, angles.

First, the special issue offers insights into the ways in which we conceptualise migration industries in light of recent migration trends. The papers by Will Harvey, Dimitria Groutsis and Diane Van den Broek; David McCollum and Allan Findlay and Oksana Žabko, Aadne Aasland and Sylvi Birgit Endresen provide insights into the nexus between labour migration and labour market intermediaries. This research helps us to understand their function as migration industries. Žabko, Aasland and Endresen, in looking at Latvian migration to Norway, look at the strategies that intermediaries utilise in order to overcome stricter regulatory practices by the state on immigration. Harvey, Groutsis and Van den Broek, addressing a gap in the literature by focusing on skilled migrant intermediaries, highlight the role that they play in addressing these migratory flows through reputational effects. McCollum and Findlay, focusing on Eastern European migration to the U.K., illustrates the relationships between different actors, namely recruiters and employers. This research helps us understand the mechanisms through which migration industries work, the strategies that they utilise both to facilitate migration processes by working with or against the government and also to produce and maintain commercial gain. It is for this reason that McCollum and Findlay argue that a greater attention needs to be paid to the ways in which we think about differences and connections between actors in the migration industry. For example, this is a point that the papers by Žabko, Aasland and Endresen and Harvey, Groutsis and Van den Broek address by illustrating ways in which social networks can be conceptualised in relation to migration industries. In doing so, the papers show how these migration industries work to shape migration flows and experiences, for example, in thinking about why skilled migrants move to particular locations or how they work to reproduce insecurity in the migrant labour force.

Thinking about the ways in which the migration industries have an impact upon our understanding of migration or mobility is the explicit focus of the papers by Sin Yee Koh and Bart Wissink; Joris Schapendonk and Ernst Spaan and Ton Van Naerssen. For example, Spaan and Van Naerssen illustrate the role that migration industries play in Malaysian migrant’s trajectories, how the manoeuvering of migration industries, within the changing context of government policies, ‘market’ demands and public discourse, generate new niches for migration. This therefore illustrates how migration industries play a role in migrant decision-making, particularly with regards to location, shaping the flows of who goes where. Koh and Wissink approach this question from a different angle showing how the intermediaries of the super-rich work to structure privileged migration for this group of people. Drawing upon literature in the mobilities paradigm, the paper shows how these intermediaries do not just facilitate super-rich lifestyles, but produce them. Joris Schapendonk’s paper highlights the ways in which African migrants to Europe navigate the migration industry, looking at how these migrants use the industry as ways in which to improvise and negotiate their mobility or immobility. Looking at these industries is, as Koh and Wissink highlight in their conclusion, a way through which we can understand the production of different types of migrants.

While all of these papers show the entanglements between migration industries and migrants themselves, other papers focus more explicitly on the operation of migration industries in themselves. Suzanne Beech, looking at higher education agents in the U.K., looks at the ways in which this migration industry negotiates visa controls, highlighting the ways in which agents work to shape the mobility flows of this group of migrants. This paper, therefore illustrates the way in which the state has an effect on the changing fortunes in the operation of the migration industries. In a different view of the economy, Sophie Cranston’s paper utilises a cultural economy perspective arguing that the Global Mobility Industry, in making corporate expatriate mobility known, works to produce a need for itself within the global economy. Collectively then by focusing on different types of mobility and different actors within the migration industries, we can focus on the linkages between theoretical and empirical approaches to ways in which migration industries can be understood.

New directions

The special issue therefore shows the value of moving our understanding of migration forward, to considering the role that migration industries play, theoretically, empirically and methodologically in our understanding of migration. That is, we see research on the migration industries as not just as a research field in itself, but as a vehicle for understanding contemporary processes of migration. Theoretically, as the papers of Schapendonk and Koh and Wissink in the special issue illustrate, looking at the intersections between migration and the migration industries allows us to revisualise migration as not just a move from here to there, but a changing journey over both space and time. Therefore, an appreciation of the role that migration industries play within processes of migration will also help studies of migration move away from the methodological nationalism that has been a subject of critique (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2002). Looking at migration industries helps highlight that our research on migration needs to go beyond the nation – both in looking at non-governmental agencies that intersect with migrant lives and their often global impulses and also how we can make sense of the journeys that migrants take. This is in part an empirical question, it gets us to think how ideas and practices associated with migration circulate in spaces that we do not necessarily directly associate with the movement of people. Part of this, is, as the special issue shows, is a revisualisation of the sites in which we carry out research on migration/migration industries. For example, we see research sites as diverse as human resource management, education agents, the migration corridor between Indonesia and Malaysia and U.K. recruitment agents. It shows that to understand migration, we cannot simply locate our research with migrants, but have a need to think more widely about the actors that intersect with their journeys.

However, in setting a future agenda for research on the migration industries, we argue that researchers should not just think about the actors that work to facilitate or control migration, but think about the wider context into which research on migration industries can be placed. That is, the value of understanding migration industries can be seen as wider than migration. As the papers in the special issue show, understanding the migration industries tells us stories about the evolving role of the state, the day-to-day operation of globalisation and how we can understand the economy. For example, an appreciation of migration industries helps us understand both the ways in which borders are produced and navigated – we see this in Žabko, Aasland and Endresen’s paper as well as Beech’s paper. Migration industries therefore can be seen as part of a much wider trend of the outsourcing of state functions (Roberts 2014). However, through this special issue we argue that migration industries can be seen as more than simply a reflection of a neoliberalising world economy. The special issue illustrates the value of opening up research on migration industries to a variety of different theoretical understandings of the economy, helping us locate migration industries as part of informal, knowledge economies. Research on migration industries has, to date, primarily been from a political geography or sociology perspective. The paper by Harvey, Groutsis and van den Broek shows us how a management perspective can contribute to the way in which we appreciate the migration industries as business, with the role of reputation being important. Cranston’s paper also highlights how migration industries can be seen as a manifestation of the knowledge economy. The different ways in which the economy of migration industries can be understood is a reflection on how migration industries are themselves part of the ‘business’ of migration in different forms.

The thinking about the ‘business’ of migration also has both political and policy implications. For example, thinking critically about migration industries helps us to appreciate how some ‘small’ questions, such as the use of recruitment agents from the U.K. to Poland in McCollum and Findlay’s paper, can help us appreciate some of the bigger questions that migration poses, such as the production of the insecurity of labour migrants. Or both Koh and Wissink and Cranston’s paper illustrate how privilege is (re)produced for already privileged migrants. In addition, the papers in this special issue show the role that migration industries play in both acting as agents for the state and assisting migrants to circumvent the state. As migration is, arguably, one of the defining issues of our time, reflected in both a rise of Far Right parties globally and increasingly protectionist immigration policies, this shows a need to understand not just the nexus between migration and the state, but migration, the state and migration industries. For example, Harvey, Groutsis and van den Broek’s paper illustrate how migration intermediaries play a role in attracting the skilled migrants that are often seen as desirable for states and Beech’s paper highlights the role that punitive visa regulations have upon the higher education market in the U.K. In moving forward with research on migration industries then there is a case for highlighting how this research can contribute to policy-making, in thinking about challenging the current anti-migration political climate.

Acknowledgements

This set of paper derives from two sessions at the RGS-IBG on Exploring the Migration Industries. We would like to thank all of the participants in these sessions as well as the attendees for the useful discussion. We would also like to thank all of the reviewers for the papers for helping us strengthen the arguments being made.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Sophie Cranston http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7068-7029