Negotiating the Wild West: Variegated neoliberalisation of the Swedish labour migration regime and the wild berry migration industry

Neoliberalisation processes have long permeated Western societies, including a common direction towards neoliberal migration regimes. This paper combines the perspective of variegated neoliberalisation with the recent literature on migration industries, to investigate the neoliberalisation of the Swedish labour migration regime and how it affected and interacted with the wild berry migration industry. It shows how neoliberalisation as a historical and spatially contingent process resulted in the distinct phases of intertwined policymaking and enactment of the industry. The ‘roll back’ phase included mutual interests and ‘intimate relations’ between state and industry, which both empowered and increased the number of private actors, creating structures that remained during the regular restructuring phase of ‘roll out’ neoliberalisation. While adding the perspective of variegated neoliberalisation, the paper deepens the analysis of migration industries by pointing at neoliberalisation as a spatial and temporal process, where the interplay between state and industry, an enlarged number of intermediaries and the increased responsibility of private actors are central cornerstones. The Swedish case shows how the role of intermediaries in the wild berry migration industry was reconstructed in order for the neoliberal migration regime to regulate a previously irregular migration industry. It is concluded that strong but spatially contingent links exist between neoliberal political economies, migration regimes and migration industries.

An organizational approach to the Philippine migration industry: recruiting, matching and tailoring migrant domestic workers

This article analyses how organizations shape migration trajectories. More specifically, by looking at the Philippine migration industry, this ethnographic research highlights how organizations such as recruitment agencies, and governmental organizations, frame migration trajectories in terms of directionality, spatiality, but also by marketing migrants in the case of domestic workers. By looking at organization’s rationalities, it shows how migration flows have become institutionalized and ruled by organizations based on economic and protection rationalities in order to remain competitive on the global domestic labor market. Moreover, it underlines the crucial role played by these organizations to ensure the matching between the employers and the employee. This article highlights thus how agencies proceed by mobilizing migrant sociodemographic data to market skills such as docility, hardworking and flexibility. In addition, this research describes in detail how age, religion, marital status become key information mobilized by agencies in order to market migrants, meet employers’ expectations, and remain competitive on the global market of domestic labor. Finally, this article emphasizes the contribution of the organizational approach in the field of migration studies.

The interurban migration industry: ‘Migration products’ and the materialisation of urban speculation at Iskandar Malaysia

Iskandar Malaysia (IM) is a 4749 km2 urban conurbation and development region located at the Malaysia–Singapore border. State-led development of this regional economic corridor has attracted inflows of foreign investments and spurred the rise of mid- to high-end urban developments by foreign developers. This has resulted in the emergence of an interurban migration industry consisting of intermediary entities that are co-developing and co-marketing ‘migration products’ (real estate, education and lifestyle migration) as an integrated package to middle-class, aspiring transnational investor/lifestyle migrants from the region. This article argues that this middlemen industry is crucial to the materialisation of urban speculation, for state actors and investor/lifestyle migrants alike. Through interurban alliances that capitalise on the broader state-led speculative urbanism landscape, the industry co-creates an imagined urban future that is grounded in transnational lifestyle mobilities. This article highlights the need to analyse speculative urbanism and transnational investment/lifestyle migration as intertwined processes.

Implementing Ethical Recruitment of Migrant Workers: Evidence from the Palm Oil Sector in Malaysia

Growing allegation of irregularities in the conduct of migrant workers’ recruitment drives global effort to eliminate unethical practices in the migration industry. As part of the international value chain, palm oil companies in Malaysia are expected to implement ethical recruitment practices. This study is an attempt to assess the employers’ commitment and practices in implementing ethical recruitment in Malaysia. Deriving from four palm oil mills (employers) and further validated through a survey conducted against 92 Nepalese workers – this study argues that while employers have committed to cover certain costs of their migrant workers’ recruitment, they lack a clear policy commitment, due diligence and monitoring against the labour recruiters. Consequently, the labour recruiters (including the intermediaries) mainly in Nepal have imposed another set of recruitment costs which already covered by the employers in Malaysia. Alarmingly, the Nepalese workers have paid even a higher cost of recruitment than the cost borne by the employers. For ethical recruitment to be effectively implemented, the employers’ monetary commitment to cover the cost of their workers’ recruitment must be complemented with efforts to engage and monitor the conduct of the labour recruiters in migrant workers’ origin country.

‘We are in the process’: The exploitation of hope and the political economy of waiting among the aspiring irregular migrants in Nepal

‘We are in the process’ was the phrase used by my Nepali interlocutors, soon-to-be migrants, who were waiting for their departure abroad for months on end. Based on conversations with irregular migrants, this paper explores the relationship between time and power, focusing on the political economy of waiting. It suggests that making people wait has become a key technique of governmentality used by the migration industry actors to control aspiring migrants’ movement, exploit their desires and hopes, and extract surplus value, turning the migration industry in Nepal into a major system of profiteering. Forcing aspiring migrants to wait in a state of suspense (not boredom) for departures that are imminent but not certain, unscrupulous brokers create an affective state in suspended subjects, which allows those in power to prey on migrants’ vulnerability and their hope for a better life, pushing many of the aspiring migrants into grave debt.