How the Box Became Black: Brokers and the Creation of the Free Migrant

Migration brokers and the organization of human mobilitydid not always exist in a black box. Before the early twentieth century, most attention from lawmakers, journalists and reformers actually focused on brokers and the infrastructure of human movement. By the late nineteenth century, however, three processes had begun to push migration brokers and infrastructure out of the limelight: 1) brokers and middlemen were increasingly demonized as the source of migration evils. This happened at a discursive level of depicting brokers as padrones, crimps, smugglers and, more generally, as the remnants of pre-modern culture that undermined the benefits of migration. Laws to regulate brokers also had the practical effect of pushing many brokerage activities underground, even as they created new opportunities for brokers to help migrants negotiate the new legal requirements. This demonization of brokers came hand in hand with 2) the emerging ideal of the "free" migrant as an atomized, self-motivated individual. Brokers were thought to interfere with the freedom that was believed to characterize a genuine migrant. Finally, 3) the new immigration laws of the early twentieth century focused on regulating entry at the border rather than the process of migration, and concentrated on the "free" individual migrant as the legitimate object of selection. The practical enforcement of these laws further made brokers invisible. Today, these combined factors continue to draw attention away from employers of migrants and broader structural processes and onto brokers as explanations for the inequities and exploitation surrounding migration.