The Dual Devolution of Migration Governance: Explaining Sub-Federal & Local Regulations of State-Supported Migration Brokers

The economies of many relatively-wealthy countries are currently in a crisis due to a lack of labor, for instance with the Chair of the US Federal Reserve recently stating that the country lacks over 1.7 million migrant workers in low-wage industries. The migration of these workers across the world is increasingly being controlled by private sector labor intermediaries who embed themselves in migrant social networks and utilize a mix of trust and money to alter both which migrants are selected to enter relatively-wealthy States as well as how they are integrated into labor markets upon arrival. 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 working with the State and employing State resources in a way that helps them legally control how migrants move across borders. Yet 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, local and sub-federal governments in select countries are increasingly creating their own licensing and regulatory schemes in order to alter how private-sector labor brokers facilitate the importation of migrant labor. This paper from a PhD dissertation therefore investigates both the different tools multiple levels of government are using when regulating private-sector labor intermediaries who facilitate migration, as well as which actors and ideas are driving policy differentiation. In particular, I employ the comparative method at the sub-national and local levels to analyze how multiple levels of government in Australia, Canada and the United States are currently regulating private-sector migration intermediaries. Findings illuminate not only key variation between the policy mechanisms used by State actors in different Countries, but important intra-country variation in how the migration brokers are regulated as well. In particular, I describe how certain State institutions are moving towards working with the private sector intermediaries in strong forms of network governance, while other levels of government continue to ignore or are attempting to criminalize the actors. The result is a rich tapestry of migration governance that illuminates how different regulations of private-sector labor intermediaries greatly alter the devolved nature of migrant selection and integration in select federations. Answers to the second question show 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 increasingly-important collaboration between local governments and migration brokers. By comparing how and why migration labor intermediaries are governed by a diverse array of institutions, we obtain a new understanding of how migration is regulated under multilevel governance as well as grasp the actors, institutions and ideas driving these policies in ways that previous studies at the national level may have missed.