The Migration Industry in Asia: Brokerage, Gender and Precarity by Michiel Baas

This pivot considers the emergence and functioning of the migration industry and commercialization of migration pathways in Asia. Grounded in extensive fieldwork and building on empirical data gathered through interactions and interviews with brokers, agents and other facilitators of migration, it examines the increasing co-dependence on, entanglement of and overlap between migrants, industry and state. Highlighting that the industry has often been reduced to the experience of exploitation, it considers how for low-skilled migrants, migration is often not even possible without the involvement of `the industry'. As the opportunity to migrate has opened up to an ever-widening group of potential migrants, the state is dependent on it for the inflow of the right type of migrants and the migration industry itself depends on the migration desires of its clients, playing an active role in fueling migration desires and creating new pathways. This pivot focuses on what unites sending and receiving sides of migration, going beyond presupposed established networks, and offering a clear conceptualization of the contemporary migration industry in Asia.