Managing the Merchants of Migration: Regulating Private-Sector Labor Intermediaries Who Promote Movement in Australia, Canada and the United States

Private-sector labor intermediaries who connect individuals seeking work with employers greatly incentive movement across international borders. The last few decades in particular have seen the brokers play an increasingly key role in governing how states decide who enters their territories and how migrants are integrated into local labor markets. Yet both historically and currently the private-sector actors systematically abuse vulnerable migrant workers, leading states to use innovative regulations to reduce exploitation. Governments across the world now use very different regulations in altering how labor intermediaries treat migrant workers and how the brokers incentivize movement. Despite the importance of relationships between different levels of government and labor brokers, we continue to lack an understanding of why states use such different mechanisms in altering how the private-sector actors promote migration. This paper employs the historical comparative method to investigate what has incentivized governments over the last 120 years in Australia, Canada and the US to form unique relationships with private-sector labor intermediaries who facilitate movement. While these settler federations all greatly rely on private-sector brokers to help immigrants and new residents find work, sub-federal governments in each of these countries employ increasingly different strategies in altering recruitment. In Australia, the abuse of migrant workers at the hands of labor intermediaries has been increasingly defined as a problem which governments should solve, with regulations that use intra-governmental collaboration and sometimes only symbolically promote worker safety proliferating across states and most recently to the federal level. In Canada, organized labor has incentivized provinces to give employment intermediaries increased liability in altering how workers are moved across borders, with the result being that the role of employers in driving abuse is largely ignored. In the US, political and legal institutions have stunted state efforts to regulate labor brokers, forcing organized labor to take enforcement into its own hands with the help of insufficient punitively-oriented broker regulations. Variations within countries at multiple levels of government accentuate these differences and cause migration to be regulated very differently even within a single federation. By comparing why state regulations of private-sector migration intermediaries take the very different shapes they do, we obtain a new understanding of the complex relationships that drive migration.