The Dual Devolution of Migration Policy: Examining Local and Sub-Federal Regulations of Migration Brokers

Private-sector labor intermediaries that connect migrants with employers play a key role in altering the global governance of labor migration. The brokers embed themselves in migrant social networks and utilize a mix of deep trust and money in altering patterns of movement, changing how migrants interact with the private-sector after arrival, and in encouraging migrant departure or change in statuses. Although the intermediaries were historically perceived as inherently working against the wishes of the State in moving labor across borders, they are now more than ever employing State resources in a way that helps them legally control how migrant labor is exploited by the private sector. Labor intermediaries are transnational in nature, yet the actors physically reside in a single jurisdiction and are accountable to local State institutions and civil society actors who influence how the brokers alter migrant experiences. While the governance of migration has historically been regarded as a key State function assigned to and held exclusively by the highest level of government, new trends regarding how private-sector migration intermediaries are regulated challenge this assumption. In particular, sub-federal governments and civil society organizations in select countries are increasingly licensing and regulating how private-sector labor brokers interact with migrants and employers; indirectly impacting all stages of the lifecycle of migration. This PhD dissertation therefore investigates to what extent private-sector labor intermediaries are increasingly being governed by a spectrum of institutions at the sub-national and local levels. In particular, I employ sub-national comparative methods to analyze how and why local State institutions and civil society organizations influence how migration brokers alter migration governance. This presentation will cover preliminary findings on how State and non-state institutions in Australia, Canada and the United States are currently regulating labor intermediaries in agriculture, in-home care and food processing, as well as what is causing policies of sub-federal governments to take the very different shapes they do. Findings for the first question illuminate the novel techniques that State institutions and civil society organizations have recently started using to alter their local migration infrastructures. I will discuss not only variation between the policy mechanisms used by different actors in different States, but important intra-country variation in how the actors are regulated as well. The result is a rich tapestry of migration governance that illuminates how the regulation of private-sector labor intermediaries greatly alters how a range of citizenship statuses are enjoyed. Answers to the second question explain how micro-level migrant agency, meso-level civil society institutions and trade associations as well as macro-level immigration schemes all interact to shape the collaboration between local governments and migration brokers. By examining how and why migration labor intermediaries are governed, we obtain a new understanding of how migration is regulated under multilevel governance, as well as grasp drivers of these policies in ways that previous studies at the national level may have missed.