by Priya Deshingkar
There is an increasingly broader and deeper
realization that there are many players in the migration industry, a loose and
changing conglomeration of individuals and institutions that work together to
facilitate mobility. The incentives for brokerage are often large, and there
are many people in sending and receiving communities who have a stake in
ensuring that irregular migration and smuggling succeeds.
A recent
webinar from the Migrating out of Poverty consortium presented cutting-edge
analysis on migration brokerage in Africa and Asia. Presenters from the Asia
Research Institute in Singapore, the Centre for Migration Studies in Ghana and the
University of Sussex in the UK explored how brokers are part of the system of
creating and producing precarity through their role in facilitating journeys
and connecting workers with employment. Migrant workers live and work in
precarious conditions, not just because of the way they’ve been employed, but because
of the restrictions placed on them by the immigration and government systems that
control their rights from the country of destination.
In policy terms, the migration industry is
usually framed as an evil and highly exploitative system that perpetuates
forced and unfree labour. However, case studies from the webinar demonstrated
that migrants can, and do, exercise agency even in highly constrained and
unfree situations.
Traditionally scholars have considered
worker agency in relation to collective forms of protest mainly in industrial
work settings. However, more academic attention is now being given to
individual forms of agency. There is now greater recognition of migrants’
strategies of accepting precarious work in the short term in order to build a
better future in the longer term. But the role of brokers in achieving long
term aspirations, and how they are integral to migrant agency, is an under-researched
area. This framing better reflects migrant’s own views
and experiences of brokerage, which can often be at odds with the way that
brokerage is viewed in migration policy and international development more
broadly.
The research presented in the
webinar provides insights into the internal workings of brokerage networks and
their role in recruiting, training, obtaining official documents and visas,
organising journeys and ensuring placements at destination. It explores the
profit-making impetus of brokerage but also pays attention to the overlapping
moral motives of brokers and relations of reciprocity between migrants and
brokers.
In Ghana, for example, internal
migration (mainly rural to urban) is very common, with girls and women
migrating to urban areas to find employment in low-paid and insecure places
particularly in domestic work. Here brokers are embedded in the system of
exploitation by moulding the migrants’ behavior and appearance to be “good” and
fit the expectations of their employers who are looking for docile and
subservient women and girls.
However, the studies from the
webinar also conceptualized brokers as an important part of migrant risk
management strategies in enabling them to fulfil their own migration agendas. While
brokerage is often viewed in a “here and now” way, the studies show how brokers
work with migrants to realise their future goals. For example, when migrants
want to switch jobs or bargain to improve their working conditions, brokers can
play a critical role.
A study of how employment
agents in Singapore and Indonesia recruit and place migrant workers
introduces the concept of conditionality. That is, the proposition that a
migrant worker’s experience of precarity is contingent on a set of formal and
informal conditions, the actions of institutional actors, and migrants’ own
resources and strategies. Viewing conditionality as not merely additive, but as
compounding, sharpens our understanding of precarious work. For example, remember
the childhood game ‘Snakes and Ladders’? (NB: Snakes and Ladders, originating
from India and commercialised as a family board game in the UK, and again
commercially reincarnated as ‘Chutes and Ladders’ in the USA). In this game,
‘Snakes/Chutes’ or vices (poor decisions) set one back and ‘Ladders’ or virtues
(good decisions) pushes one forward.
The researchers in Singapore use
this model of ‘Chutes and Ladders’ to help demonstrate how migrant domestic
workers move in and out of varying degrees of precarity over time. Based on
qualitative interviews with migration intermediaries, the study suggested that
these ‘chutes’ and ‘ladders’ are not static, pre-existing, or inherent;
instead, they are dynamically produced by migration brokers, who actively
produce, shore up, or mitigate situations of precarity for workers by
‘patching’ chutes, leaving them, or opening up new ones. Conversely, brokers
and employers redraw the boundaries of conditionality through the creation of
ladders. Workers’ access to security is hence not merely conditional, but
conditionally compounded, based on the necessity of simultaneously meeting
multiple mutually reinforcing and interwoven conditions.
The webinar does not try to downplay the inequality in most
migrant–broker relations. However, it provides a multi-layered view whereby brokers
and migrants, both, should be understood as co-creators of complex pathways of
migrant circulation. Migration brokerage crafts and supports structures that
produce ‘good migrants’ and precarities, however, over time, migrants may
successfully maneuver and challenge these structures with the potential for
social and economic change. Furthermore, the research shows that brokers can
also play a role in lessening precarity and increasing protection for migrants
from abuse.
Listen to the recorded webinar here: Connection Men, Dalals, Maid Agents - traffickers or not?
Please, thank you and sorry – brokering migration and constructing identities for domestic work in Ghana
Mariama Awumbila
Mariama Awumbila
