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Abstract

This first report on research about the geographies of migration examines the sociotechnical platforms that enable migration and shape its outcomes. I begin by examining two areas of recent inquiry that analyse (1) commercial actors that form migration industries and (2) the broader infrastructures that underpin and direct migration. To elaborate on these insights, I also discuss observations of multinational (stepwise) migration as grounded evidence for the importance of sociotechnical systems in understanding the geographies of migration. Addressing platform migration reconfigures the spatialities and temporalities of migration, highlighting the diverse and distributed actors, networks and institutions generating, directing and constraining movement in the world.

Keywords

borders industry infrastructure intermediaries migration regimes platform temporalities time

I Introduction

Until recently, migration studies, including those undertaken by geographers, have surprisingly paid little attention to the mechanisms and actors that make migration possible (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Sorensen, 2013). Significant attention has been paid to understanding why migrants leave, forms of migration management and border control as well as the processes of settlement or conditions of life that occur after arrival, but ‘considerably less [is] known about the forms of infrastructure that condition [migrant] mobility’ (Lindquist et al., 2012). In this first report, I focus on the ‘middle space of migration’ (Kern and Müller-Böker, 2015), entailing the actors, networks and institutions that enable international migration, give shape to migratory flows and ultimately play a significant role in transforming the experience and outcomes of migration. Research on these topics has ballooned over the last decade, reflecting recognition of previous lacunae, the influence of wider debates about logistics and infrastructure (Hesse, 2020) and the growing significance of migration systems that extend beyond the nation state (Collyer and King, 2015). Certainly, state-coordinated regimes and border systems remain critical sites for the exercise of power in relation to migration (Allen and Axelsson, 2019), and migration controls serve as one of the most potent symbols of state authority (De Genova, 2015). As recent research has demonstrated, however, the significance of state regimes can be overstated because the enablement and government of migration now substantially exceeds national territories and involves individuals and institutions beyond the state (Xiang and Lindquist, 2014).

In order to shed light on the interconnections between different actors, networks and institutions in the middle space of migration, I borrow language from cognate discussions of sociotechnical platforms as key forms within contemporary society (Larkin, 2013). The idea of platforms, and conceptions of ‘platform economy’ (Guyer, 2016), ‘platform capitalism’ (Dal Maso et al., 2019) or ‘platform urbanism’, indexes the emergence of ‘nascent and developing socio-technical formations that coincide with sweeping shifts being wrought across spheres of economic, political, and social life’ (Leszczynski, 2020: 191). Often associated with the development of digital applications such as Uber, Google Maps, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on, the notion of platforms actually speaks to wider sets of social, economic and political forms and relations. Anthropologist Jane I Guyer, for example, suggests that ‘a platform is made up of built components and applications, from which actions are performed outwards into a world that is not itself depicted’ (Guyer, 2016: 114).

Platform migration is not a different form of migration but rather highlights that migration operates through multiple, mutating components and applications that inspire, act on, constrain, limit and redirect flows of people across territories. These may involve platforms as mobile applications, particularly in relation to migrant labouring (e.g. van Doorn et al., 2020), but my intention in invoking ‘platform migration’ is much wider. Drawing attention to platform migration suspends the overwhelming emphasis on the migrant and the state in migration studies, providing scope to focus more carefully on the embodied dimensions of mobility, the logics and operation of control and the possibilities of disruption and reconfiguration that pervade current systems.

Loosely drawing on the notion of platform migration, I focus this report on research addressing the organisation and management of migration, as well as its limits. The report separately addresses literature on migration industries that has addressed specific intermediary actors and institutions as well as work on migration infrastructures that takes a broader view of the connectivities and logistics that underpin and shape migration. To demonstrate the actually existing operation and effects of these articulated but uncoordinated migration platforms, I also introduce scholarship looking at multinational (stepwise) migration as grounded evidence for the importance of sociotechnical systems in the management and conditioning of migration and their effects in the lives of people on the move.

II Migration Industries

Research on migration industries emerged in 1970s accounts of control subsystems in rural-urban migration (Mabogunje, 1970) and the ‘commerce of migration’ undertaken by migration agents (Harney, 1977). The migration industry (brokers, recruitment/employment agents, smugglers, among others), though, is hardly new, as historian Adam McKeown (2008) has demonstrated in his accounts of the intermediation of 19th century emigration from Asia. Indeed, intermediary actors and state efforts to regulate them as a negative force on migration have given shape and meaning to distinctions between free and unfree movement that remain central concerns in contemporary migration (Cuttitta, 2018; Erdal and Oeppen, 2018).

Since the 1990s, geographers have raised concerns that migration studies view movement as either resulting from microeconomic responses (rational economic choice) or macroeconomic structural forces (sociospatial inequalities between nations, regions, etc.) (Goss and Lindquist, 1995; Hugo, 1996). Such approaches missed the ‘middle space’ that made migration possible, the ‘migrant institutions that articulate, in a nonfunctionalist way, the individual migrant and the global economy, ‘stretching’ social relations across time and space to bring together the potential migrant and the overseas employer’ (Goss and Lindquist, 1995: 335). The focus on the ‘migration industry’ (Hugo, 1996), recruitment practices (Tyner, 1996), ‘migration channels’ (Findlay and Li, 1998) and ‘migration as business’ (Salt and Stein, 1997) all examined how intermediary actors facilitate ‘movements of particular types in particular directions’ (Hugo, 1996: 108) while also shaping ‘gender, ethnic, and occupational composition’ (Tyner, 1996: 414).

The work of brokers, agents, recruiters and other actors in migration industries has become much more significant in part because of shifts in forms of border control and the increasing complexity of state attempts to manage migration (Cranston et al., 2018; Gammeltoft-Hansen and Sorensen, 2013). As Ehrkamp (2017) made clear, migrants have been increasingly framed as ‘security threats’ as part of the ‘war of terror’ since the early 2000s. The border securitisation and externalisation that has taken shape around migration (Tazzioli and Garelli, 2018) incorporates complex technological and bureaucratic mechanisms for restricting flows and channelling migrants into dangerous and precarious movements (Soto, 2018). Large-scale clandestine movements, such as through central America and across the Mexico/US border, or in the Mediterranean basin, thus rely on networks of actors and alternative systems to enable migrants to seek passage, claim asylum and retain agency in directing their own mobility (Schapendonk et al., 2018; Slack and Campbell, 2016). Even for authorised migrations, the greater emphasis on vetting skills, health, character, family, finance and other requirements, alongside a proliferating and shifting landscape of visas/permits, means that a functioning migration industry has become indispensable to continuation of movement, as well as serving as an extension of state control (Goh et al., 2017; Walton-Roberts, 2020b).

A fundamental feature of migration industries are practices of brokerage, the work undertaken especially by migration agencies to mediate between individual migrants and a migration system or regime (Deshingkar, 2019; Kern and Müller-Böker, 2015). Actors in migration industries connect people and places through the establishment of networks and through formal processes of placement, whether in regularised labour supply, educational systems or through trafficked mobility. Brokerage, thus, entails establishing platforms that actively work on the character of migration – establishing pathways or trajectories for migrants through complex systems (Collins, 2020; Wee et al., 2019), negotiating and managing labour relations and debt financing (Baey and Yeoh, 2018; Moniruzzaman and Walton-Roberts, 2018) as well as through cultivating conceptions of the ideal migrant/worker (Awumbila et al., 2019; Collins and Bayliss, 2020; Deshingkar, 2019; Picherit, 2019). The figure of the broker is often framed in moralistic terms, an actor who seeks profit through inducing, deceiving and victimising migrants while simultaneously disrupting the intent of state control of migration (Deshingkar, 2019; Rai, 2020).

This normative view of migration industry activities reinforces neat but problematic dichotomies between free/unfree or voluntary/involuntary migration (Cuttitta, 2018; Erdal and Oeppen, 2018; McKeown, 2008) while ignoring the extent to which migration agents, brokers, recruiters, even traffickers are part of wider social networks where the lines between victimisation and altruism can be blurred (Rai, 2020). It is, for example, commonly observed that brokerage practices enhance the precarity of migrants (Lindquist et al., 2012) but through enabling mobility and cultivating aspirations, intermediaries also create space for agency, making mobility possible even if at a cost; ‘subjectivation/precarisation and agency should not be examined as two opposing poles but rather as an inherent part of the migration process where one cannot be separated from the other’ (Deshingkar, 2019: 2639). Moreover, moralistic accounts of brokerage as a practice, and the work of migration industry actors more generally, have a tendency to obscure the role of the state in establishing and maintaining oppressive migration controls, and at times colluding with or operating through the migration industry to manage people’s movements (Goh et al., 2017; Spaan and van Naerssen, 2018).

Increased research on migration industries has expanded insights into who and what is involved in these practices of intermediation. The migration industry is not constrained only to facilitating clandestine migration (Casas-Cortes et al., 2015; van Liempt, 2018) or regulated labour mobility (Goh et al., 2017; Wee et al., 2019), although these are some of the most intense terrains of migration intermediation. Migration industry actors also facilitate and condition mobility associated with international education (Basford and van Riemsdijk, 2017; Beech, 2018), sports people (Waite and Smith, 2017), the super-rich (Koh and Wissink, 2018), expatriates (Cranston, 2018) and return migration (Cohen, 2020). While such forms of mobility and migration are vastly different in their patterns, participation and experiences, they are part of a wider commercialisation of international migration (McCollum and Findlay, 2018). Migration industries are hence active players in creating migration possibilities, making markets for intermediation wherein data, tools and advice, the repackaging of migrant identities and potential opportunities, and the normalisation of certain mobility patterns are key knowledge practices (Cranston, 2018). Viewing migration industries in this expanded way also, however, opens up questions about other forms of enablement that support mobility that have been addressed through a broader focus on ‘migration infrastructure’.

III Migration Infrastructure

Alongside the specific commercial activities of the migration industry, related research has recently taken an ‘infrastructural approach’ (Lin et al., 2017) examining the broader social and technical systems that enable and direct mobility. Much of this research has emerged through productive engagements between anthropologists and geographers working in and/or on migration in the Asian region (Lin et al., 2017; Lindquist et al., 2012; Shrestha and Yeoh, 2018). Studying migration infrastructures entails a substantial broadening of the lens associated with migration wherein the spatially attuned insights of geography and the in-depth ethnographic accounts of anthropology are both essential. Migration infrastructures also signal a departure from West-centric migration scholarship, dominated by a rhetoric of crisis and a reification of the state as pre-eminent migration manager (Shrestha and Yeoh, 2018). Migration histories in Asia are such that migration and its enablement by different actors often took shape before the emergence of national postcolonial states (Amrith, 2019; Lai et al., 2013). Accounts of industry and infrastructures supporting migration in Asia, thus cannot only frame these as responses to state control – migration infrastructures are the ground upon which state practices themselves emerge.

Anthropologists Xiang and Lindquist (2014: S124) have advanced the most refined conceptualisation of migration infrastructure, defining them as ‘the systematically interlinked technologies, institutions, and actors that facilitate and condition mobility’. Unlike the specific migration-oriented work of industry actors, this infrastructural approach encompasses heterogeneous actors, institutions and technologies that may not necessarily be targeted towards migration itself, even as they nonetheless contribute to its enablement and conditioning. Xiang and Lindquist (2014: S124) observe five ‘logics of operation’ that characterise migration infrastructure, ‘the commercial (recruitment intermediaries), the regulatory (state apparatus and procedures for documentation, licensing, training, etc.), the technological (communication and transport), the humanitarian (NGOs and international organizations), and the social (migrant networks)’. Unlike literature on migration industries, then, an infrastructural approach does not tease apart commercial from regulatory, humanitarian and social as separate domains but observes how logics of actors overlap and intersect in clusters that serve as background and foreground influences on movement.

Two points are particularly salient in the infrastructural approach to migration. Firstly, migration infrastructure is not limited to those actors, institutions and technologies that are focused explicitly on migration. Air transportation, for example, must be examined not only as a background characteristic but as an active platform for and generator of migration opportunities (Ashutosh, 2020; Hirsh, 2017) while also being entangled in border securitisation as part of ‘deportation infrastructures’ (Walters, 2018). Likewise, communication technologies – smart phones and social media especially – are pivotal to the circulation of information about migration destinations, the establishment of social networks and the increased propensity for migration (Boas, 2017; Dekker et al., 2016). As Gough and Gough (2019) demonstrate, smartphones have played a pivotal role in refugee journeys – as a technology that makes navigation possible, creating connections to migration industry actors like smugglers and maintaining social interactions transnationally. Places are also imbued with other infrastructures that shape migration. Meeus et al. (2019) describe ‘arrival infrastructures’ as features that ‘newcomers become entangled [in] on arrival, and where their future local or translocal social mobilities are produced as much as negotiated’. Housing is an obvious example of such infrastructures (Robertson, 2017), as are the solidarity spaces that provide respite for unauthorised migrants (Mitchell and Sparke, 2018). Each serve not only as part of adaptation to place but also can be a foundation that enables further migration. Infrastructure in this regard is not simply a background to migration but rather dynamic, shifting and affective platforms that are involved in the ongoing production of migrant mobilities (Lin et al., 2017).

Secondly, the emphasis on logics of operation in migration infrastructures eschews the distinctions between migration domains, such as between state, industry and social actors. While interdependence is apparent across the logics of operation that Xiang and Lindquist (2014) outline, it is the entanglement of humanitarian with regulatory and commercial logics that is perhaps particularly salient. Rather than a counterpoint to regulation, humanitarianism has been revealed to be a key channel through which migration is actively managed at multiple scales. Sanctuary cities (Darling, 2017) or ‘safe spaces’ (Mitchell and Sparke, 2018), and assertions of migrant rights (Humphris and Sigona, 2019), for example, are not exceptions to illegalisation and regulation but rather, ‘through enabling undocumented migrants to access services and support, cities [and regions] can be seen to “manage” an undocumented population for the wider “good” of the city [or region]’ (Darling, 2017: 185). Indeed, humanitarian infrastructure can be critical to generating the knowledge that governments need to regulate flows (Cuttitta, 2018) as well as the access sought by researchers studying migration (Pascucci, 2017). The International Organization of Migration has been the subject of substantial research (Pécoud, 2018) revealing the way in which its discourse of humanitarianism articulates with the externalisation of borders by states (Brachet, 2016), deportation regimes (Mountz et al., 2013) and the establishment of corridors for labour migration (Gabriel and Macdonald, 2018). Facilitation, control and aid are not distinct domains of infrastructural operation but, rather, articulated in the enablement and management of migration, revealing a much more supple account of power and spatiality than is possible within accounts that prioritise a focus only on distinct domains of states, intermediaries and migrants.

IV Multinational Migration

The increasing focus on industries and infrastructures as platforms for making and shaping migration generates a very different vision of the geographies of migration. Traditionally, research on migration, and still most policy-facing and orthodox scholarship, presents an account of migration as a movement from one national context to another wherein migrants make active and independent decisions about why and where to move as an once-off event (Carling and Collins, 2018). This formula expresses a spatiality of distinct and separate nation states and a temporality of migrants moving in a linear fashion towards knowable futures – methodological nationalism tied to conceptions of fully agentive and rational economic actors, in other words. A focus on the middle space of migration generates a very different view of migration’s geographies (Kern and Müller-Böker, 2015; Shrestha and Yeoh, 2018). Migration platforms can emerge in multiple locale and are necessarily interlinked across territories, reconfiguring local, regional and global flows, while migration itself needs to be seen as a continuous process without established beginning or end points. Moreover, facilitation and the generation of desire to move are not distinct from but rather imbricated with regimes of control and redirection.

A growing body of research in recent years has observed and examined forms of migration variously named ‘onward’, ‘stepwise’ and ‘multinational’. Accounts of onward and stepwise migration are not themselves particularly new, having been observed in internal migration for several decades (Keown, 1971; Withers and Watson, 1991) and aligning with established research on the connection between internal and international migration (Huang, 2016; Hugo, 2016). ‘Multinational migration’ is a more recent observation (Paul, 2017) and is taken to refer to ‘the varied movements of international migrants across more than one overseas destination with significant time spent in each overseas country’ (Paul and Yeoh, 2020: 2). This pattern has been observed among migrant domestic workers in particular (Francisco-Menchavez, 2020; Paul, 2017; Silvey and Parreñas, 2020), although it is also identified among working migrants in other globalised sectors such as nursing (Walton-Roberts, 2020), agriculture (Collins and Bayliss, 2020) and sex work (Hwang, 2017). Multinational migrations are particularly apparent in Asia (Paul and Yeoh, 2020) and Europe (Ahrens et al., 2016), reflecting the establishment of socially sustained channels of migration (Findlay and Li, 1998), migration industries (Cranston et al., 2018) and broader infrastructures connecting migrants to opportunities to move at multiple points on migration trajectories (Lin et al., 2017).

Multinational migrations are not ordinarily planned in advance, and nor are they predictable by either researchers or migrants themselves (Paul and Yeoh, 2020). Rather, subsequent migrations are often generated through experiences or encounters that occur in initial forays. Anju-Mary Paul (2017: 14), whose account of Multinational Maids has been particularly influential, has highlighted how multinational migration can be associated with significant changes in migrant agency:

while their initial departure from their home country may not always display much agency on the part of migrant domestic workers, often seeming more like ‘force choice’, by their second and subsequent journeys, they begin to display more and more intentional decision-making.

Migrant agency relates to many issues here, but it is particularly notable that migrants who move multiple times are able to do so because they become familiar with systems of migration governance, how to access reliable information, what kinds of industry and other actors are key to subsequent moves and awareness of how to present themselves as desirable migrants/workers (Collins, 2020; Walton-Roberts, 2020). In this regard, multinational migrations reveal very clearly the significance of platforms of infrastructure and industry in generating and shaping migration – migration, singular or multiple, does not just happen because of structural forces and nor is it only a result of individual choices, it is actively enabled and directed by diverse platforms that configure possibilities for moving in the world.

Multinational migration also draws attention to the extended and complex temporalities of movement enabled by various platforms (McGarrigle and Ascensão, 2017). Rather than singular, linear and progressive movements, circumstances surrounding migration can change, opportunities emerge and/or are shut down and aspirations develop, diminish or become (re)directed (Amrith, 2020). As such, focusing on multiple migrations resonates with a recent interest in time and temporalities in migration research (Mavroudi et al., 2017). There are also important connections to a focus on ‘journeys’ (Mainwaring and Brigden, 2016; McDowell, 2018) and ‘trajectories’ (Schwarz, 2018). Indeed, some of the most significant dimensions of migration, socially, economically and in relation to subjectivity are generated as people negotiate places on route rather than before departure or after arrival in intended ‘final’ destinations, whether geographical or a desired migration status.

Multinational migrations can also be ‘staggered’ (Robertson, 2019) or ‘provisional’ (Collins, 2019) because migration and border control regimes are designed to restrict access to long-term residence while providing greater access to precarious time-limited migration statuses (Roberts, 2019; Tan and Hugo, 2017). Walton-Roberts (2020), for example, observes a ‘two-step study-work (multistage) pathway’ for nurses moving from India to Canada (see also Collins, 2020, for a related account on New Zealand). Nurse migrants in this context are channelled through skills policy and language testing towards a costly and prolonged process of enrolling in healthcare courses (as international students), taking on various work options (on temporary visas) and hoping to eventually transition to longer term residence. At each stage, various migration infrastructures/industries are key – education/migration agents, language testing and schools, employers, changing regulatory systems and channels of information – all of which make negotiating migration possible but also exert influence on migrants, their aspirations, identities and socio-economic circumstances. Examples such as this demonstrate the significance of sociotechnical platforms in multinational migration. While even singular movements must be enabled, multinational migration simply cannot take place without a wide range of migration platforms that support information circulation, facilitation of migration, different forms of interlinked governance and the role of places in generating skills and capital for onward movement.

V Conclusions

In this first report, I have sought to amplify the recent emphasis on the middle space of migration and to explore how migration industries and infrastructures act as platforms for enabling and shaping migratory flows. The emphasis on platform migration calls attention to the manner in which migration is made possible and conditioned not only by fully sovereign states and individuals but in their articulation through a range of intermediary actors, institutions and networks. The study of different dimensions of the middle space of migration has diverse geographical origins, migration industry research has emerged through a generally European and North American focus on commercial actors, while the recent emphasis on infrastructures is shaped by the realities of connectivity in Asia. There are also productive interactions between geography and other disciplines, most notably anthropological and geographical analyses in accounts of infrastructure and its effects. While much research on migration industries and infrastructure has to date focused on contemporary patterns, many of their functions and effects have substantial historical lineages that have yet to be sufficiently examined.

The focus on platform migration reconfigures how the spatialities and temporalities of migration are understood. Echoing the direction of research on moorings and mobilities, a focus on platforms highlights the complex and shifting landscape of actors, networks, materials and ideas that stitch together places to make migration possible. Platform migration thus also bears on questions of power relations and migrant agency. The control of migration has been shown to be distributed well beyond state-run border regimes, involving extensive collaboration with commercial, humanitarian and social actors and institutions, only some of whom are focused on migration itself. In turn, migration and migrants’ capacity to direct their own mobility need to be read in relation to the imbrication of facilitation and control whereby movement, across deserts, oceans, borders and through skills regimes, is not fully free or unfree but articulated into particular pathways or channels. In this regard, and as accounts of multinational migration demonstrate in particular, migration itself is not easily circumscribed in relation to beginning and end points because as a process it involves much more than just individual migrants and the places they come from and go to.

As this progress report on migration was being written, Covid-19 and government responses were completely altering the landscape of migration. In such a context, it might be tempting to imagine an end to migration as we know it (e.g. Gamlen, 2020). A focus on platform migration, however, draws attention to both the entrenched mechanisms that support and sustain migration as well as their significance in responding to the pandemic’s impact on movement. While I take up these issues in greater detail in a subsequent report, it is worth noting at this juncture that many government responses to Covid-19 actually draw on existing migration industries and infrastructures (IOM, 2020), and in some cases, such infrastructures have provided the foundation for migrants to navigate border closures (Haugen and Lehmann, 2020). Rather than being undermined by border closure and travel suspension, migration platforms are what make such actions feasible while laying the groundwork for their negotiation.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Francis L. Collins

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Geographies of migration I: Platform migration

Abstract

Keywords

I Introduction

II Migration Industries

III Migration Infrastructure

IV Multinational Migration

V Conclusions

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

References