What is a legitimate mobility manager? Juxtaposing migration brokers with the EU

ABSTRACT

This article juxtaposes two types of actors who offer migration services: a state-managed EU programme in Cape Verde and two Cameroonian development NGOs run by businessmen. By framing both as managers of mobility, the article contributes to debates on migration management and the migration industry. The article takes the paradox between official narratives and migrant experiences as a starting point to ask why and how both types of mobility managers can mobilise legitimacy. Staying clear of normative evaluations of the respective legitimacy and success of market and state actors, the article shows that both types of migration managers are involved in producing ‘the legal migrant’ in different ways. On the basis of ethnographic material from Cameroon (2007–2014) and Cape Verde (2010–2012), the article discusses the functioning of the two kinds of mobility managers, their relations with aspiring migrants and respective modes of self-representation. In conclusion, the article shows that despite apparent differences between migration brokers and the EU, the article’s mobility managers share the use of ‘development’ as a trope for legitimising their activities.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration brokers
• human smuggling
• market
• state
• migration management
• legitimacy

By means of promoting legal mobility and strengthening the capacity of the Cape Verdean state to manage migration, the EU has granted one million Euro to the Portuguese Institute for Development Support (IPAD) to design and manage a migration and development programme, called CAMPO (Centro de Apoio ao Migrante no País de Origem/Support Centre for the Migrant in the Country of Origin). With public funds, CAMPO has put into place an agency in Cape Verde with the aim of setting a good example for efficient and legitimate mobility management and promoting development through migration. While its official website hails its success and praises its expertise, research into the actual workings of the programme reveals that CAMPO has managed only to send out three Cape Verdeans and that aspiring migrants distrust the agency’s capacity and ‘true’ objectives.

In Cameroon, families with migration aspirations turn to public figureheads who create NGOs to see the travel projects of family members facilitated. Families of aspiring migrants pay for ‘travel consultations’ with organisations, such as ‘International Assistance for Community Development’ (INACOD) and ‘Africa Asia Learning Connection’ (AALC). While such migration brokers are framed in dominating global discourses as illegal brokers, smugglers and unscrupulous businessmen, research into the actual workings of migration brokers reveals that the managers of AALC and INACOD are generally trusted and even admired for trying to help families raise their standard of living through the facilitation of travel and migration projects.

While CAMPO might only have sent out three people, the very existence of the programme increased the legitimacy of the EU Commission as an actor in the field of migration and development management. Throughout its existence, the project was portrayed as a ‘success story’ for cooperation between the EU and ‘Africa’ in that field (Africa EU Partnership, n.d.). In a similar vein, while INACOD and AALC have not been able to send out all of their clients to their desired destination countries, their programmes nevertheless established international connections and possibilities. Regardless of the number of actual travel projects and returns in the form of remittances and investments, the very existence of migration brokers allows for the hope of development and a continued sense of global belonging (Alpes 2013).

These two cases illustrate that aspiring migrants and state officials uphold different visions of what constitutes a legitimate mobility manager. While Cape Verdeans compare signing up for the EU’s mobility programmes with playing in the lottery, programme officials represent themselves as experts on mobility management. Migration brokers in Cameroon represent their NGOs as expert organisations, too, but are framed by states as members of illegal smuggling networks. Rather than investigating normatively the success of the above two cases, the article takes the paradox between official narratives and migrant experiences as a starting point to ask why and how both types of mobility managers can mobilise legitimacy. By empirically analysing modes of self-representations and migrant perceptions, the article unravels theoretical connections between mobility, development and state power.

Anthropology has a strong tradition of juxtaposing cases that seem disparate in order to provoke a change of perspectives (Nyiri 2013). The article’s comparison of CAMPO and the Cameroonian migration brokers serves exactly this purpose: We intend to question assumptions about actors involved in the organisation of mobility by juxtaposing two cases that on the surface appear to be quite dissimilar. CAMPO serves us as an example for a publicly sponsored development and mobility manager that is legitimate in the eyes of the state system, yet distrusted in the eyes of aspiring migrants. INACOD and AALC serve us as examples for privately sponsored mobility managers that are illegitimate in the eyes of the state, yet trusted in the eyes of aspiring migrants. Seeking to forego normative judgements about the legitimacy or success of different types of mobility managers, we frame both state and market actors involved in the organisation of migration as mobility managers. Legitimacy is understood as concordance with collectively recognised principles or accepted rules and standards. Such recognition and acceptance can stem from the power of law, and also the moral authority of broader societal dynamics, which are disconnected from legal frameworks.

The article is based on an ethnographic study of the Cape Verdean CAMPO programme carried out during repeated field visits (2010–2012) and 13 months of fieldwork with migration brokers in Cameroon (2007–2009). The article opens with a theoretical discussion of aspects that underpin legitimacy within the organisation of mobility and a methodological reflection of the article’s two juxtaposed cases. In the three empirical parts of the article, we juxtapose how the article’s different mobility managers act in order to become credible as legitimate mobility managers. We start by discussing their production of the good and ‘legal’ migrant, and follow up with an inquiry into the actors’ legitimising techniques. Thereafter we turn the attention to how aspiring migrants perceive the different mobility actors. We conclude by spelling out how different conceptions of development explain the divergence between the views of migrants and of state actors on what constitutes a legitimate mobility manager.

Mobility managers: the creation of legitimacy

Although queries about legitimacy are often raised in relation to mobility managers, the different aspects that may underpin notions of ‘legitimacy’ are rarely discussed. In this article, we aim to disentangle the trope of legitimacy by exploring how it is constituted in relation to the two very different cases we juxtapose. One important finding is that despite the differences between the cases, there are common underlying notions that inform constructions of legitimacy. In both cases, legitimacy has to do with ideas about the state’s laws and also concerns understandings of development and the types of migrants it produces.

Mobility, legitimacy and the state

Mobility is managed by different actors. State actors, migration brokers and family members can collide, as well as overlap in their respective ambition to shape migration trajectories. In his work on the globalisation of borders, McKeown (2008) traces how state authorities in the past have competed with and sought to evermore regulate other mobility managers. Although migration is fundamentally a social process that requires mediation at many different levels (including at the level of the state), extensive government intervention has delegitimised the activities of non-state actors in mobility management. As this quest is still ongoing today, the state has a vested interest in framing market and family actors within the management of mobility as illegitimate. The de-legitimisation of non-state actors is key to migration control, which in turn is key to the construction and legitimation of state power (Torpey 1998, 240; McKeown 2012; Xiang 2013).

Much research on transnational migration is conducted from the perspective of ‘the migrant-receiving nation state’ that looks at immigrants as ‘outsiders coming in, presumably to stay’ (De Genova 2002, 421). As a result, migration scholars have sometimes failed to reflexively attend to the regulation of movement as a particularity fundamental to the modern state system (for exceptions and reflections on this problem, see among others Van Schendel and Abraham 2005; Vigneswarann and Quirk 2015). By categorising migration brokers as either ‘smugglers’ or ‘traffickers’, for example, scholars sometimes fall into the trap of ‘seeing like the state’ (Scott 1998). Terminological choices within scholarly knowledge production on migration intervene directly in political struggles over the legitimacy of mobility management. With this article, we want to call for greater reflexivity about how scholarship positions itself vis-à-vis the state’s ongoing quest for a monopoly over the legitimate means of movement.

Policy makers and many migration scholars routinely consider migration brokers as the cause of both migrant illegality and vulnerability (Salt and Stein 1997; Kyle and Koslowski 2001; Aronowitz 2009; United Nations Office on Drugs Crime 2014). The description of a mobility manager through market language, such as ‘business’, ‘price’ or ‘profit’ is a delegitimising strategy, broadly reproduced in both policy and research (Alpes 2013, 2017b). While statist perspectives frame the work of brokers as being driven by big profit, ethnographic work with migration brokers illustrates how migration brokers are often migrants themselves, earn little and are in need of the income (Sanchez 2014). Relations between brokers and clients cannot be reduced to functionalist market transactions (Beuving 2013) and need to take local cultural norms into consideration.

Mobility, legitimacy and development

In recent years, policy makers in Europe have legitimised migration control by framing it in a development discourse. Programmes aiming at ‘combatting illegal migration’ have been combined with development aid (see e.g. Andersson 2014, 47–54). In order to intensify the fight against illegal migration, the EU has, for example, set up so-called Mobility Partnership Programmes and readmission agreements with neighbouring African countries, and framed these as development cooperation. A general conclusion in research on Mobility Partnerships is that the EU interests dominate the cooperation, and that the control of migration flows has come to play a key role (e.g. Chou and Gibert 2012). The CAMPO project is an example of this, and it is a part of the Mobility Partnership agreement between the EU and Cape Verde.

Researchers and policy makers have also come to frame good and legitimate Africa-to-Europe migration as migration that leads to development (Åkesson and Eriksson Baaz 2015; Sinatti and Horst 2015). Having come to stand for values that people across the globe have been educated to see as inherently positive (Gardner and Lewis 2015, 9), development supposedly indicates modernity and equality. It also connotes global connections, prosperity and inclusion. Yet, as many social scientists have shown, understandings of development are linked to a specific world order. In a critique of the dominance of the development paradigm, Arturo Escobar (1995) contends that the development discourse has to do with a particular exercise of power, which maintains postcolonial relations.

The European donors promoted CAMPO as a development project even though its activities primarily aimed at deterring Cape Verdeans from embarking on journeys that, in the end, could make them ‘illegal’. In these cases, ‘development’ serves to legitimate powerful border regimes. The Cameroonian mobility managers drew on ‘development’ in an entirely different manner. They presented themselves as development NGOs and referred to the development of their home communities. In their understanding, the mobility of their clients itself constituted development. By connecting their mobility management with the notion of ‘development’, they positioned themselves discursively as a bridge to the powerful and affluent parts of the world, where their prospective clients dreamt of one day having a place.

Situated in a field of power termed ‘government’ by Michel Foucault (Murray Li 2007, 5), development interventions also aim to shape people’s behaviour. Development programmes build, firstly, on an identification of a problem that needs to be rectified, and, secondly, on the education of desires, habits, aspirations and beliefs (Murray Li 2007, 5ff). The CAMPO project enacted this kind of ‘governmentality’ by identifying illegality as a problem and trying to educate and inform aspiring migrants to conform with state-driven understandings of what constitutes an ideal migrant. Cloaked in the term of ‘development’, CAMPO’s ultimate aim was arguably to make people realise that it was in their own interest to avoid migration that did not produce ideal typical ‘legal’ subjects. In contrast, the Cameroonian brokers identified immobility as a problem and tried to imitate and circumvent legal forms. INACOD and AALC did not embrace ideas about educating their clients. As long as the clients paid, and there was a likelihood that they could get through border controls, they could go.

Method: juxtaposition

According to Nyiri, juxtaposition is about rendering different cases, situations or elements comparable, and he underlines that this rendering is always based on the theoretical, political and personal preferences of researchers. Here, our choice to place CAMPO and the Cameroonian brokers side by side is informed by our ambition to denaturalise state-dominated perspectives of migration. This ambition is based on our long-term experiences of fieldwork among aspiring migrants, which has provided us with a personal and political view of the migration infrastructure industry, which differs from the quotidian Northern view as presented in policy and media.

Since the early 1990s, international migration management with its tight visa regimes has excluded both Cape Verdeans and Cameroonians from travelling to desired destination in more affluent countries. As a consequence, our ethnographic work with mobility managers in both places was framed by our explorations of struggles of aspiring migrants to overcome predicaments of involuntary immobility (Carling 2002). Contrary to the logics of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002), we do not situate our analysis at the level of both national settings, but at the level of mobility managers. We integrate historic, geographic and cultural specificities of migration patterns in Cape Verde and in Cameroon when relevant to the working of the article’s mobility managers.

CAMPO is a flagship project of the 2008 Mobility Partnership between the EU and Cape Verde. The European Commission gave a grant of one million Euro to the IPAD to set up and manage CAMPO for three years. CAMPO had two official objectives: First to promote legal Cape Verdean migration by matching skills of aspiring migrants and available jobs in Portugal (Instituto Português de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento, n.d., 5). In multi-colour pamphlets distributed throughout the country, CAMPO announced that they would provide information about job vacancies in Europe, but as pointed out above, the project in the end only supported three legal migration projects to Europe. Although this figure was never made public, aspiring migrants were aware of CAMPO’s incapacity to meet its defined objective as nobody had ever heard about anyone migrating with the help of CAMPO. Relying largely on transnational family networks, Cape Verdeans thus continued to mobilise study and tourist visas, as well as family reunification and document marriage as a means to achieve their ambitions of mobility.

CAMPO’s second official objective was to facilitate developmental effects of migration by supporting returnees with their reintegration in Cape Verde. Just as with the facilitation of out-migration, CAMPO supported over a time span of three years a mere three people with their return to Cape Verde. Instead of promoting legal emigration or voluntary returns, CAMPO staff spent most of their time warning aspiring migrants about the risks of illegal migration. Although nowhere officially defined as such, the prevention of illegal migration came to constitute the core of CAMPO’s activities. CAMPO’s unwritten new objective clashed vastly with Cape Verdeans historically rooted understandings of migration as an inevitable ‘destiny’ and key avenue to ‘make a life’ (Åkesson 2004).

The article’s mobility managers in Cameroon responded much more directly to expectations of aspiring migrants. INACOD and AALC were founded as NGOs by two Cameroonian businessmen called respectively Mr. James and Mr. Walter.¹ Mr. James was a former office worker for a German development agency. Mr. Walter was a civil servant – working as a math teacher at a secondary school. Both offered travel consultations and programmes, based on collaborations with embassies, recruitment agencies and individual fixers. Mr. James recruited aspiring migrants through collaborations with secondary schools and the national employment fund in Cameroon. He also functioned as the youth leader in his village of origin. Mr. Walter collaborated with the Chinese Ambassador in Cameroon. Having graduated from an elite school, Mr. Walter was furthermore well connected with officials in different sectors of public life.

The actual capacity of INACOD and AALC as mobility managers to succeed with their various travel projects is difficult to evaluate in precise terms. In 2008, internal AALC registers documented at least 19 clients that had paid for travel projects to China (6), Europe (12) and Dubai (1). During 13 months of fieldwork, it was possible to observe the departure of eleven clients to China (6), Belgium (4) and Malaysia (1). Internal office registers at INACOD point to an estimate of at least 24 departures to Dubai, three departures to South Africa, four departures to Europe and one departure to South Korea in the year of 2008. In the university town where INACOD and AALC operated, students, teachers, neighbours of informants and shop owners all knew about the organisations’ capacity to send people abroad.

The article’s juxtaposed mobility managers all operate in a context where enduring economic crises and a sense of exclusion from the positive aspects of globalisation have turned migration into one of the few beacons of hope for families to change their socio-economic situation (Åkesson 2013; Alpes 2014; Carling and Åkesson 2009). Local perceptions in the region closely intertwine migration and development. In both locations, migrants have constructed most of the urban multi-level family buildings and remittances pay for education and replace a weak social security system (Atekmangoh 2017). Cape Verdean and Cameroonian families with limited income consider occasional remittances of even only 50 Euro as signs of the success of their family members abroad.

In the following, we will discuss how CAMPO, INACOD and AALC act in order to enhance their credibility, and we start with their making of the legal migrant.

The production of the legal migrant

The introduction (Deshingkar 2019) and other articles in this special issue (see Awumbila et al. 2019; Picherit 2019) describe how brokers engage in the making of the ideal migrant through striving to produce a worker that can match employers’ preferences. To ‘package’ (Constable 2007, 64f) the prospective migrants in a way that makes them attractive on the labour market in destination countries is in the interest of many migration brokers. This approach to the ideal migrant, however, was not apparent in the cases we describe. Instead, the Cameroonian brokers and the CAMPO project were engaged in making their clients embody the figure of the ‘legal migrant’. In both cases, the making of legality was approached in different ways.

In the case of CAMPO, the rationale behind the project was to prevent the existence of ‘illegal’ Cape Verdeans in Europe, and support (at least in words) migrants defined as ‘legal’ by the member states of the European Union. Thus, the legitimacy of the project in the eyes of its financiers hinged on its capacity to differ between these two kinds of migrants, and to promote the latter. In line with this, CAMPO presented the differences between the ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ migrant as absolute and fundamental when addressing the Cape Verdean public in information campaigns. According to CAMPO campaigns, the illegal migrant runs the risk of being denounced, repatriated, exploited, trafficked and sexually abused, whereas the ‘legal’ migrant does not risk any of this.

The literature on Cape Verdean migrants shows that there are no such black-and-white differences between the fate of documented and undocumented migrants. The CAMPO project primarily targeted individuals aspiring to go to Portugal, and research on Cape Verdeans in Portugal clearly shows that the risks of exploitation and extremely precarious working conditions are immediate also for Cape Verdeans with all their immigration documents in order (Fikes 2010; Weeks 2015). Moreover, as noted, the project was, in practice, incapable of promoting legal migration. Arguably, this suggests that the image of the legal migrant produced by CAMPO was primarily aiming at satisfying the project’s EU-backed sponsors.

In the case of the Cameroonian mobility managers, the rationale behind their work was to overcome forced immobility. Given current access chances for visas at Embassies in Cameroon, Cameroonian mobility manager produced the ‘legal migrant’ by imitating or circumventing the legal form. The legitimacy of the project in the eyes of aspiring migrants hinged on their capacity to make people pass through border controls at airports. In line with this, AALC and INACOD did not foreground details about where and how they had been able to access which travel documents or who had issued these travel documents in which circumstances. A migrant was successfully produced as ‘legal’ if he or she could pass through a border control without being stopped by police officers.

What mattered for the production of legality in the case of the Cameroonian mobility managers was whether travel documents worked (Alpes 2017a). According to local discourse, compatriots had much better chances of working real money when abroad. The point of comparison here were exploitative salaries in Cameroon itself. The exact legal status of a Cameroonian migrant is secondary to whether or not migrants are able to send back money to home communities (Alpes 2017b).

Modes of self-representation among mobility managers

Beyond their respective production of the ‘legal migrant’, the article’s mobility managers also employed other and ultimately quite similar techniques to legitimise their work. Migration brokers in Cameroon and the EU’s CAMPO project in Cape Verde notably performed as ‘experts’ and ‘developers’ to demonstrate the legitimacy of their work as mobility managers.

Legitimising techniques of EU mobility management

In Cape Verde, the EU’s project demonstrated its expertise in mobility management by reproducing postcolonial power hierarchies, by transforming social problems into seemingly apolitical technical questions and by framing irregular migration as a problem of a lack of information. CAMPO’s five national offices in Cape Verde were staffed by 13 Cape Verdeans, who were called medeadores (mediators). These mediators were supervised by a Portuguese project manager who was based in the capital of Praia. The project manager was a fabulously well-dressed and ambitious woman of about 30 years, who never addressed the mediators or visitors in the locally spoken Cape Verdean Creole, but in formal Portuguese. Cape Verdeans speak Portuguese only in exceptional and extraordinarily ceremonial circumstances, and most Portuguese who work in the country make an effort to mix their Portuguese with the local Creole. The project manager’s attitude towards Creole thus mirrored postcolonial relations between Portugal and Cape Verde. Cape Verdean civil servants who had professional ties with the CAMPO characterised its bureaucratic methodology and systematic reliance on written instructions as ‘very Portuguese’ and as indicative of ambitions for domination.

The official job description of CAMPO’s mediators was to attend to those who sought advice and support from CAMPO. In their everyday work, the mediators used a ‘manual for procedures’. This manual contained detailed instructions on how the mediators should receive different kinds of ‘clients’ and what kind of information they should provide. Although CAMPO was set up as a development project, its manual talked about the potential beneficiaries of its programme as ‘clients’. The manual transformed different conversations supposed to develop between the mediators and their ‘clients’ into ten different flowcharts – all made up by small boxes tied together in intricate patterns by many arrows pointing in different directions. At a quick glance the flowcharts appeared to be an instruction booklet for handling a technical device, not a tool to guide human interactions. Turning dialogue between mediators and people into technical procedures, the flowcharts were intended to regulate the mediators’ behaviour, which then, in turn, was supposed to shape the conduct of aspiring migrants (see Foucault 1991).

In the flowcharts, irregular migration was treated as a deviation that the mediators should seek to correct. When confronted with people who intended to work abroad, but asked for information about tourist visas, the mediator should according to the manual ‘help the clients to establish a correspondence’ between their intentions and the visa regulations (CAMPO, n.d., 11, our translation). There was no information about how mediators should detect when ideas of aspiring migrants did not correspond to regulations, or more importantly how to establish a ‘correspondence’ when work permits were generally not available.

In its handling of people and job opportunities abroad, CAMPO aspired to be seen as an organisation that followed automatic and disinterested procedures. Involuntary immobility – a fundamental and depressing factor in many Cape Verdeans’ lives – became in this manner a technical question that should be handled according to a manual’s flowcharts. The practice of ‘rendering technical’ (Murray Li 2007) concealed the existential and political nature of being involuntarily immobile (Carling 2002; Alpes 2014). In the face of people’s frustrations with being forced to stay in their country of birth, the EU’s CAMPO project self-represented itself as an institution that floated above the messy interests of individuals.

CAMPO’s extensive webpage, reports and information brochures represented irregular migration as being caused by aspiring migrants’ lacking capacity to access and interpret information about migration rules. In its information campaigns, CAMPO performed its expertise by portraying migration rules and procedures as enormously complex, and thus requiring CAMPO’s mediation and interpretation. In its brochures, prospective Cape Verdean migrants figured as unknowing, deficient and potentially fraudulent subjects. CAMPO’s authority and legitimacy as a mobility manager was underscored by its portrayed capacity to change and educate such a population.

Campo’s representation of irregular migration as being caused by a lack of information also formed part of its role as a ‘developer’. In its quest to favourably connect migration and ‘development’, CAMPO set out to both educate aspiring migrants and develop the capacity of the Cape Verdean state. Capacity building notably consisted in trainings on elaborate bureaucratic techniques of government. The bureaucratic and detached handling of people’s migration projects was presented as a rational practice, characteristic of a modern state and thus necessary for development (Murray Li 2007).

Legitimising techniques of migration brokers in Cameroon

In Cameroon, migration brokers demonstrate their role as development professionals and experts in mobility management by enacting global connections, by reproducing the cultural codes of official state structures and by framing mobility, legality and development as something that can be achieved through connections.

Just as CAMPO, the two migration broker offices in Cameroon sought to induce development through migration. The declared goal of INACOD was to promote community development by means of ‘career counselling’ and ‘international travel assistance’. Its director talked of his career counselling sessions as ‘the only way to better prepare our children for the many opportunities in the global world’. INACOD staff participated in a public manifestation carrying posters that warned against the dangers of illegal migration and its director regularly appeared on the radio – advocating the advantages of travelling with organisations, such as his own. He called for the government to step in to ensure that INACOD and other similar organisations ‘carry out their activities in the interest of the community’. The declared objective of AALC was to be ‘a global, client-oriented organization determined to be the most diversified and innovative education and training service company in our chosen market’. This ambition was underscored by its publicity material showing shiny airports and promising ‘high quality airport pick up services for all its clients’.

Contrary to the mediators of CAMPO, the migration broker offices of INACOD and AALC were visible and well known in their respective locations. Day after day, the two migration brokers and their staff informed aspiring migrants about different travel opportunities and their respective costs. In his conversations with clients, the founder of AALC used to calculate and demonstrate how much money his clients would be able to make, for example, as English teachers in China. Young and ambitious, both migration brokers constantly designed new programmes, business ideas or partnerships with, for example, domestic labour agencies, schools or potential employers and universities abroad. In the office of INACOD, an employee also carried out independent fundraising work for development projects.

As an office, INACOD was specialised in travel projects for nurses and welders to Dubai. AALC was able, on a regular basis, to send out its applicants to China. Most of their clients worked there as English teachers – in the hope of later being able to either open up a trading company between Cameroon and China or to use their savings to sign up for university degrees in English at Chinese universities. As most Anglophone Cameroonians prefer to travel to Europe or Northern America, INACOD and AALC regularly worked on trying to establish travel projects to these destinations, too.

When aspiring migrants entered the offices of either migration broker, they had to pay a small registration fee of a few Euros. Subsequently, a file was opened with their name and contact details. These formal proceedings perform stateness and officialdom. Once an aspiring migrant had chosen the kind of programme that he or she wanted to apply for, a second more significant payment of at least a third of the actual travel costs had to be given to the respective organisation handling their case. In 2008, a travel programme to China or Dubai would cost about 3000 Euro. A travel programme to Europe or Northern America would cost 4000 Euro. While Mr. James and Mr. Walter tried to formalise procedures with their clients through files, fees and regulations, realities were always flexible and the actual handling of the travel projects was different for each and every individual client.

Both migration brokers dressed according to the local codes of ‘big men’. They were always in suits and equipped with several mobile phones. The former underline how migration leads to economic success and the later performs global connectedness. Mr. Walter also drove a big car and enjoyed showing off passports of his clients who already had visas. Mr. James was insistent on having his office decorated with maps of the world, plastic aeroplanes, Cameroonian flags and university brochures from abroad. When needing the support of his employees in his office, he would instead of raising his voice call on them by ringing a bell that was installed under his desk. The presence of a white researcher was welcomed as a potential source of further legitimacy for their offices.

Although clearly marked as ‘big men’ and public figureheads, Mr. Walter and Mr. James always spoke English-based Pidgin with their clients. As a linguistic minority in their own country that need to speak a foreign language when trying to access basic public services, Anglophone Cameroonians feel alienated by the very state whose nationality they hold. Contrary to dynamics at the offices of CAMPO in Cape Verde, aspiring migrants were thus able to communicate freely. In coming to the offices of INACOD and AALC, aspiring migrants were able to speak their own language in an official setting that ought to give meaning to their hopes of an international existence beyond the discriminations and frustrations that go with being a linguistic minority.

Linguistic practices at CAMPO and INACOD/AALC offices indicated on the one hand different types of relations within the organisations as well as with aspiring migrants and on the other hand different interpretations of what international mobility meant and stood for. Different understandings of migration became tangible in how aspiring migrants perceived the work of the article’s two sets of mobility managers.

Aspiring migrants’ perceptions of mobility managers

Despite similarities in their self-declared objectives, aspiring migrants have very different perceptions of the two sets of mobility managers discussed in the article. These diverging perceptions are related to how aspiring migrants perceive of what or who can make migration attainable. In order to evaluate such migration opportunities, aspiring migrants draw on both local and globalised discourses. In both Cape Verde and Cameroon, aspiring migrants and their social networks frequently discuss the workings of state-sponsored official channels, the infrastructure of migration and the role of luck. Thus, far from adopting rigid and state-centrist conceptions of illicit smugglers and licit institutional services, aspiring migrants conceive of mobility managers in relation to contextually changing notions of migration opportunities at large.

Aspiring migrants’ perceptions of EU mobility management

In Cameroon and Cape Verde, chances for a positive outcome with visa applications are so low that aspiring migrants do not consider that migration can be accessed through official channels alone. Professional mediators and/or social networks are considered necessary if migration projects are to come true. In Cape Verde, the EU’s CAMPO project has further reinforced this conviction. Potential users of the EU’s project believed that the actual goal of the project was not to manage migration, but to keep them immobile.

State management of migration is supposedly rational and governed by rules, and that was also how CAMPO presented its approach. Aspiring migrants’ reasons for visiting CAMPO did, however, not always fit with the project’s self-representation. Some visited CAMPO in search of ‘luck’, that is, a chance to migrate. Those who searched for luck were often in a quite desperate situation, and they visited CAMPO with a vague hope of locating some kind of opening that could possibly help them migrate.

One reason why Cape Verdeans see migration opportunities as a question of luck has to do with widespread experiences of the arbitrariness of consular officers’ visa decisions (see Alpes 2013 for similarities with Cameroon). One Portuguese consulate officer in Cape Verde told Åkesson that she just needed to look at applicants who enter her office in order to decide whether they are eligible for a visa. Many Cape Verdeans have at least once tried to acquire a visa at consulate, and they often described this process as a ‘lottery’. In the perception of many aspiring migrants, the arbitrariness of the process is total, except in the case when an applicant has been able to set up a beneficial relationship with somebody working at the consulate. Thus, state-managed migration has been instrumental in creating notions of migration projects as determined by luck.

The fact that CAMPO presented itself as a project that had to do with migration was enough for attracting some of those who more or less desperately searched for an ‘opening’. In addition to these sorts of visitors, CAMPO also attracted young people collecting information about student visas. Other kinds of aspiring migrants did generally not visit the project. For instance, CAMPO’s representative on one of the islands said that during a period of two years she had only received seven visitors seeking information from the project.

Why then did CAMPO mainly attract people searching for luck and university information, while its aim was to reach potential illegal migrants? First, many of those who risk becoming irregular actually do not see themselves as illegal migrants, because they leave legally on a tourist visa, which they later overstay. Second, CAMPO’s failure in reaching these people had to do with the fact that many believed that the project’s real (but hidden) objective was to stop migration. One of CAMPO’s mediators observed that the project had little to offer, except warnings about ‘the difficulties of migration’. She was self-aware of the little added value of such warnings by commenting that everyone already knew what she was paid to give out as information. ‘You just have to watch the television.’

People in Cape Verde generally are well aware of the dangers and problems associated with irregular migration, and they are often updated on the requirements for legal migration. Nearly everyone in Cape Verde has a close relative abroad (Åkesson 2004), and discussions about legal migration channels as well as about exploitation of illegal migrants are a part of everyday conversations, but despite this CAMPO focused on ‘information’ in its attempt to change aspiring migrants’ behaviour. By transforming familiar information into technical expert knowledge, the project foreclosed the possibility of actually entering into a dialogue with those who planned to overstay a visa or enter into a paper marriage.

As a consequence, aspiring migrants did not see CAMPO as a legitimate partner that could support them in managing their migration plans. Instead, some aspiring migrants saw this EU-sponsored ‘migration and development project’ as yet another actor trying to control and reduce their possibilities to move. As CAMPO managed to send out very few people, aspiring migrants would trust the expertise and mediation of family members living abroad more than that of CAMPO.

Aspiring migrants’ perceptions of migration brokers

Through their offices, INACOD and AALC establish connections with the outside world, as well as new possibilities for young Cameroonians that are not eligible for visas at official embassies. Repeatedly, aspiring migrants referred to Mr. Walter and Mr. James as ‘Ambassadors.’ The director of INACOD, for example, connected the people he had managed to send out of the country with the members of the youth group that he was coordinating in his village of origin.

In Anglophone Cameroon, news about the success cases of migration brokers spreads more easily and broadly than about failed departure projects. By means of trying to secure their migration trajectories, aspiring migrants in Anglophone Cameroon always keep their departure projects secret. The unfortunate persons, whose travel project did not go through, could thus choose to return to their home communities, pretending to have only been absent because of a travel project inside the country. If a travel project to a difficult destination, such as the U.S. or Sweden, failed, Mr. James or Mr. Walter would, however, always offer to send the respective client to either China or Dubai. Wanting to avoid shame and the loss of all of their investments with the migration broker, most aspiring migrants accepted the change of their travel destination.

When Cameroonians go to consulates to apply for visas, the early abortion of their travel plans is, in most cases, hundred per cent certain. While migration brokers do not always succeed with their initially promised travel programme, aspiring migrants would nevertheless value the potential of at least having the possibility of leaving the country.

The money that aspiring migrants would give to migration brokers without being able to travel can have dramatic consequences for entire family networks. Yet, aspiring migrants in Cameroon would not think of financial transfers to migration brokers as purchasing prices for arriving at a travel destination, but more as investments into an infrastructure (Xiang 2013) that would put them into a better situation of hopefully being able to travel. Migration brokers function as key actors of a migration infrastructure industry.

Brokers routinely create the demand for their own services (Beuving 2013) and have been critiqued for this by policy makers and state actors who, as we have seen in the case of CAMPO, pretend that migration is straightforward and does not require mediation. Aspiring migrants in the offices of INACOD and AALC would not generally consider that passing through a migration broker meant that they would be migrating illegally. In 13 months of observations in both offices, the question of legality was raised only once. When the aspiring migrant asked what type of visa she would be getting, the assistant of Mr. James responded that a visa was a visa. With this, the conversation was closed. In the eyes of aspiring migrants, the success or failure of their investments instead depended on the trustworthiness and powers of their respective broker.

Because aspiring migrants do not necessarily associate mediation with illegality, migration brokers in countries of departure are able to legitimise their actions by presenting migration as complicated and dangerous and themselves as experts. In this manner, sensibilisation campaigns that seek to warn populations in departure countries of the dangers of illegal migration can actually feed into the respectability and authority of migration brokers that offer alternative migration routes through their own connections.

Constructing the (il)legitimacy of mobility managers

The juxtaposition of our two cases has revealed that despite the apparent differences between privately and publicly sponsored mobility managers, CAMPO, INACOD and AALC nevertheless share a significant number of characteristics. First, although all three agencies have set up offices with the objective of sending out aspiring migrants, none of them have managed to send substantial numbers of migrants abroad. Second, CAMPO, INACOD and AALC all state that they share the objective of trying to promote development through migration. Third, all three actors present themselves as experts on international migration, although through different techniques.

From an official statist perspective, however, there is an absolute and insuperable breach between these two sets of mobility managers. As a product of the international state system, CAMPO’s legitimacy is not questioned by its funders even when few visitors come to its offices and only three migration projects are facilitated under its auspices in three years. By contrast, migration brokers such as INACOD and AALC are branded as ‘criminal smugglers’ – even when some of their clients are able to leave the country and travel. The state-based perceptions of CAMPO as a legitimate mobility manager and of AALC and INACOD as illegitimate ones hinge on three assumptions, which all are related to the understandings of development.

First, the legitimacy of CAMPO is associated with the assumption that developmental effects of migration are stringently tied to the legality of migration trajectories. This strong causal link cannot be confirmed by our research in Cameroon and Cape Verde, and has been up for discussion in academia (van Meeteren 2012). When struggling and hardworking irregular migrants manage to gain a long-term foothold in the country of immigration and find a decently paid job, they are often able to accumulate economic and human capital, which they can put to use in their country of origin. This means that some irregular migrants send remittances and invest in productive activities upon return (for an example see Åkesson 2015).

Second, the legitimacy of CAMPO as a mobility manager hinges on an understanding of formal techniques of government as development itself. The internal coherency and quality of flowcharts and manuals were supposed to set off development automatically. By contrast, AALC and INACOD aimed at development through mobility and paid labour – regardless of whether their techniques would fit into ideologies of the modern nation state. In juxtaposition with the EU project in Cape Verde, the article’s two migration brokers in Cameroon were labouring towards another vision of development. In their case, migration and development implied above all global connectivity. Connections to privileged geographical and social spaces were seen as leading to access to university studies and job openings, as well as an intensified circulation of people and goods. As long as migrants were strong, smart and energetic, development was something that could be achieved by migration trajectories of any kind – including through means that might be classified at later stages by state agents as ‘illegal’.

Third, constructions of the legitimacy of different mobility managers are tied to understandings of circulation of money as at times disinterested and unrelated to notions of profit. In the case of CAMPO, for example, the European Commission mobilised a budget of one million Euro. These funds stemming from taxpayers’ money were supposed to be used for the promotion of development in Cape Verde. For a small state, such as Cape Verde, this is an enormous amount of money. Once channelled into the CAMPO project, the one million Euro became largely lost to its population. Following trends for the NGO-isation and developmentalisation of migration management CAMPO funding went not only to civil servants and project staff in Cape Verde, but also to personal at the Portuguese Institute for Development Assistance and the IOM (International Organisation for Migration) in Lisbon. Nevertheless, these lost funds have not delegitimised the EU as a mobility manager. On the contrary, CAMPO has been celebrated as a successful example of migration management.

In the case of CAMPO, references to migration and development served ironically – and as noted by some of the aspiring migrants in Cape Verde – as a cloak for CAMPO’s ultimate objective: the combat of illegal migration. The outsourcing of the project to a development institute and its collaborating state partners in a third country rendered it difficult to see that CAMPO actually is a part of the increasingly restrictive European border regime. Indirectly these restrictive migration policies have created a situation in which aspiring migrants often cannot realise their aspirations to migrate. In the face of ever greater degrees of involuntary immobility, a demand for services of migration brokers has emerged in emigration countries. Given that the consulates of Northern states, to a large extent, no longer are likely or reliable sources of visas for aspiring migrants in Southern countries, migration brokers have emerged to fill the gap.

Yet, the notion of the state as a mediator of legitimate migration is important also for aspiring migrants. In line with this, the Cameroonian brokers tried to market their services through ‘performing as a state’. They appeared in public spaces warning against illegal migration, they followed formal bureaucratic procedures, they talked about themselves as ‘ambassadors’ and they decorated their offices with flags. While state-like appearance of migration brokers can serve as legitimising tools, such self-portrayals are not enough in and of themselves. Aspiring migrants in Cape Verde, for example, do not trust the EU-funded CAMPO project – largely because it provides no migration opportunities. In the eyes of aspiring migrants, a legitimate migration manager must have some capacity to meet the needs of those who want to leave.

In conclusion, this article proposes a new analytical lens to analyse empirical data on third-party-mediated migration. Migration management – with its state-centric and normative terminology – feeds into the state’s ongoing quest for a monopoly over the legitimate means of mobility. Consequently, public understandings of migration brokers as shadowy figures – scrupulous in their quest for profits – is above all based on images and regulatory projects of the nineteenth century and less on actual insights into the workings of brokers (McKeown 2012, 39).Through the mobility management lens, we argue that we can gain awareness of implicit influences of state power in process of knowledge production on human smuggling. The article thus supports first relativising the state’s role in mobility management. Secondly, it urges migration scholars to reflect on how terminological choices carry assumptions and thus influence the perspective from which knowledge is constructed. Free from the needs of states to legitimise its position of authority, this reflexive approach will allow for new insights into legality, luck, money and brokerage.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The tax regime being harsh and unpredictable, the status of an NGO allows entrepreneurs protection from external demands on their income-generating activities. As a result, many small businesses are officially registered as ‘Common Initiative Groups’ – the official legal term for NGOs in Cameroon.