Introduction: Brokerage, gender and precarity in asia’s migration industry

Abstract

Due to the commercialization of migration pathways, the opportunity to migrate has opened up to an ever-widening group of potential migrants. Furthermore, the ongoing formalization and regulation of migration trajectories also makes that increasingly migrants have no choice but to seek out the services of specialists in order to meet stringent rules and regulations. This Introduction argues that the emergence of a migration industry across Asia needs to be understood in this light. Asking two interrelated questions-what is the migration industry and what is lacking in its analysis so far-this chapter shows how each of the studies included in this edited volume provides important insight to this.