Managing the Merchants of Migration: Comparing Sub-federal Regulations of Private-Sector Migration Intermediaries in the United States, Canada and Australia.

Private-sector labor intermediaries both historically and currently greatly alter migration governance through the recruitment of migrant workers across international borders. While these non-state brokers play a key role in promoting healthy labor migration, they also systematically abuse vulnerable migrant workers in ways that damage markets both where migrants originate from and work in. While migration intermediaries and attempts to regulate them go back centuries, the last few years have seen a mushrooming both in the number of private-sector labor brokers which recruit migrants as well as state regulations which alter how low-wage migrant workers are recruited. Despite this long history, we continue to lack an understanding of the explanatory factors which cause states to use very different mechanisms in indirectly altering the promotion of migration. This paper from my PhD dissertation investigates the historic and current explanatory factors which cause states to regulate private-sector labor intermediaries who facilitate migration in different ways. In particular, I employ the historical comparative method (from 1900 to the present) in California (US), Ontario (Canada), and Victoria (Australia) to better understand why governments choose to use different regulations and subsidies to alter how migration intermediaries move workers across international borders. These sub-federal jurisdictions were chosen both as they originate in three similar settler federations which both historically and currently have promoted migration through private-sector intermediaries, and because they each have passed novel licensing schemes in the last few years which employ very different strategies in altering migrant recruitment. By comparing how private-sector migration intermediaries are governed in different ways by sub-federal governments as well as the factors which cause regulations to take the very different shapes they do, we obtain a new understanding of how migration is promoted by an array of State and non-State institutions in ways that previous studies have missed. Historical analysis up to the present day is structured by examining the different actors, institutions and ideas which have caused these sub-federal governments to intervene in different ways in how migrants are recruited into their territories. Results surrounding actors describe how migrants, intermediaries and employers across countries have all increasingly been turning to the state to regulate recruitment, however with very different expectations on how this should be done. Institutional factors describe how political parties and dualized labor markets prefer different types of regulation depending on how political decisions are made and how migrant labor is used in local economies. The analysis of ideas examines why sub-federal governments sometimes see the systematic abuse of migrant workers in their territories as a problem worth addressing, and why they choose regulatory mechanisms which either allow organized labor, trade unions or government agencies to take a greater role in altering migrant recruitment. The result is a mid-range theory that highlights how migrants’ power resources combined with increasingly dualized labor markets and new ideas surrounding state reputation and responsibility for ensuring worker safety are leading to new and unique laws surrounding migrant recruitment.