1. The Migration Industry:
Charting the Relations of
Facilitators, Control and
Rescue Actors in International
Migration
Rubén Hernández-León
Dept. of Sociology
UCLA

2. The Migration Industry
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The MI is the ensemble of entrepreneurs, firms
and services which, motivated by financial gain,
facilitate international mobility, settlement and
communication and resource transfers across
borders.
The specific activities, services and entrepreneurs
that make up the MI comprise a sphere with
changing boundaries, depending on state policies,
the stage of the migratory cycle, the types and
volume of migration and political and economic
circumstances.

3. The Migration Industry
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State sponsored
recruiters
Large remittance
firms
Travel agencies
Immigration lawyers
Formal transportation
companies
Real estate promoters

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
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Smugglers
Illegal recruiters
Informal transporters
Loan sharks
Notary publics
Fake document
providers
Couriers, viajeros,
remesadores

4. The Migration Industry
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The MI arises from the geopolitical and
communication discontinuities imposed by states
and their borders, which translate into barriers to
mobility, transfer of resources and information.
It is the existence of borders and other forms of
state organized closure that constitute the raison
d’être of the MI.
But borders are also the places where the MI
(actor and infrastructures) is concentrated.

5. The Other Migration
Industries
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Other migration industries are present at
borders:
The industry of control: prisons, border
surveillance, deportations.
The ‘rescue’ industry: NGOs vested with
‘saving,’ rehabilitating and resettling
migrants.
A bastard industry of control: trafficking,
kidnapping and extortion.

6. Conceptualizing the
Migration Industry
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The MI should be theorized and analyzed
as part of a larger social and organizational
field that includes other key actors of the
process of migration.
Theories of international migration tend to
ignore the MI or to subsume it under other
actors and institutions: facilitators are a
migrant institution or migrant social capital.

7. Conceptualizing the
Migration Industry
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Making us of an existing conceptualization:
Zolberg’s Strange Bedfellows of American
Immigration Politics.
Charts the unusual alliances of the actors
that favor and oppose immigration on either
economic or cultural-political terms.
Scheme can be used as an initial template to
chart relations, articulations, movements.

9. Charting relations:
facilitators, control, rescue
actors
Present elements:
MI is a distinct and
autonomous actor.
MI occupies distinct
position in a field.
Relations can be
inferred from position.
Polity as field where
interactions occur.
Missing elements:
The movement of actors
between and within
quadrants.
Suggests but does not
include all actors (i.e.
rescue & control industry).
Focused on immigration,
not emigration or IM (what
happens outside state).

10. Figure 2. The Migration Industry in the ‘Strange Bedfellows’ of American Immigration Politics
Source: Adapted from The ‘Strange Bedfellows’ of American Immigration Politics, in Aristide R. Zolberg, "Matters of State:
Theorizing Immigration Policy," in The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, ed. Charles Hirschman, P.
Kasinitz, and J. DeWind (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), 71-93.
Co-Ethnics
Cosmopolitans
Migration
Employers
Transporters Industry of
Facilitation
Putative
Economic +
Effects
Putative
Cultural/Effects
+
st
ni
tio
ra s
ig
m ition
Im al
Co
‘Rescue’
Industry
st
ni
tio
ric ons
t
es liti
R a
Co
Control
Industry
Traditional
Nationalists
_
Native Workers
Local Authorities
--

11. Charting relations:
facilitators, control and
rescue actors
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-
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-
Upper left quadrant:
Employers closely aligned
with MI. Often,
undistinguishable.
Co-ethnics and
immigrants with privileged
access to MI.
But also cosmopolitans
working in NGOs.
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Outline of rescue
industry: when
NGOs members
commoditize
information.
Local authorities &
unions move to left
quadrant & become
tolerant of migrants
& MI.

12. Charting relations:
facilitators, control and
rescue actors
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Control industry coalesce with politicians that push
an agenda to restrict migration.
Control industry benefits from the continuation of
migration but also from massive expenditures to
deter and control migration.
Advocates but also former government officials are
able to use knowledge to become facilitators OR
employees of the control industry.
Rescue industry actors can become facilitators but
also subcontractors of control functions.

13. Charting relations:
facilitators, control and
rescue actors
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Representatives of foreign governments
(the migrants’ countries of origin) who build
political-economic alliances with facilitators
and rescue actors.
In sending, transit and destination countries,
state actors establish a variety of relations
with the bastard industry of control (mafias,
cartels, trafficking and extortion rings).

14. Conclusions
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MI of facilitation, control and rescue do not
exist in a sociopolitical vacuum but are part
of larger field of actors and institutions with
which they establish relations, alliances
and organic articulations.
A migration industry lens shows that
politically ‘strange bedfellows’ might be
economically familiar bedmates linked
through subtle and undetected moves.