Papers That Work: Migration Brokers, State/Market Boundaries, and the Place of Law

Abstract

Abstract State discourses on smuggling and trafficking are regulatory technologies that seek to institute moral hierarchies between institutions by villanizing third‐party mediators as dangerous criminals. This article instead studies high‐risk migration and illegality through the actions of migration brokers and from the perspective of aspiring migrants in a place of departure. Seeking to overcome the legal/illegal divide by focusing on interactions at socially constructed state/market boundaries, the article asks two questions: What is the role of legality for aspiring migrants? And what role do states play in the emergence of migration brokers? Based on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Anglophone Cameroon, between 2007 and 2013, and a case study of two migration brokers, the article demonstrates, first, that aspiring migrants evaluate migration brokers and travel documents in terms of their powers and efficiency, and, second, how migration brokers enact state‐like forms and activities.