By Edward Mohr

The recruitment of low-wage migrant workers across borders in many ways has changed little over the last century. In 1916, the US Department of Labor stated that the newly arrived immigrant is reliant on private-sector recruiters who always hold out glowing promises of work but most often exploit mobile workers for financial gain.

Over 100 years later, recruitment agencies continue to systematically abuse low-wage migrant workers seeking work across borders around the world, hurting not only vulnerable individuals but also the economies of the countries where mobile workers most often work and those they originate from.

Take for example BaronHR, which legally operated as a recruiter in mid-2020s California, helping migrants gain employment in the warehouses and distribution centres that deliver goods the next day. While BaronHR generated over US$750 million in revenue in a decade, the mobile workers whom the recruiter legally employed were not getting paid. After several years of labour and tax violations, federal authorities finally intervened; however, BaronHR simply dissolved and re-emerged under a new corporate identity, StaffLab LLC.

This persistent abuse raises the question at the heart of my new book, Managing the Merchants of Migration: Regulating Private-sector Recruiters: why have we been unable to regulate migrant labour recruiters for over a century?

Migration and the actor in between

Although low-wage migrants represent a small share of the global pop­ulation, they play a key role in relatively wealthy economies. By toiling in the jobs that native-born workers largely do not want to do, migrant workers form a separate labour market that provides key goods and services. Furthermore, the demand for mobile labour is growing rapidly across the world.

While human movement is frequently understood as being managed by governments, most of the tasks that make up contemporary systems of migration governance are in fact run by the private sector. As low-wage employers often do not know how to find workers across borders, and potential migrants are likewise unsure about how to move to a new country and sell their labour while abroad, both frequently turn to an actor known as a recruiter.

A migrant labour recruiter is simply an individual or firm that connects migrant workers with other recruiters or employers across a border for a fee. Among a long list of abuses, the recruiters frequently require migrants to pay high costs for their own recruitment, take away passports, use threats of violence and deportation, and illegally skim wages.

This abuse of low-wage migrant workers disadvantages all migration stake­holders. Exploitative recruitment practices reduce labour costs for some firms, creating competitive distortions by allowing companies to sell goods and ser­vices at a lower cost than their competitors.

‘About half of the world’s 300 million international migrants are in the labor forces of host nations. Edward Mohr tackles the question of whether and how to regulate the “merchants of migration” that help workers move over national borders, offering fresh perspectives on an increasingly important issue.’
– Philip L. Martin, University of California, Davis, USA

Regulating the Recruiters

These exploitative dynamics and inefficiencies are not inevitable. As low-wage labour migration so often leads to precarity and abuse, international organisations and governments alike have increasingly started collaborating to ensure that human rights are respected as individuals move across borders for work.

Much of the migration governance literature continues to analyse the role of the private sector, migrants or governments in isolation, rather than as interdependent actors of one system. This book instead examines how migrant labour recruiters have actively worked with governments to shape systems of movement.

Especially since the first and second Global Conferences on the Regulation of International Recruitment in 2019 and 2024, attended by over 65 countries, regulating the recruiters has gained new urgency. International organisations such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) have now asked for multiple levels of government, employers, migrants and the recruiters themselves to all come together in an all-network approach to regulating the recruitment process.

Since 2018, for example, the Australian state of Victoria has required recruit­ers who legally hire low-wage workers before renting out their labour to obtain a state-issued licence before operating. Since mid-2024, Ontario, a Canadian province, has regulated not only the same recruiters as Victoria, but additionally all the recruiters who refer international immigrants for employment. Even municipal governments such as that of New York City have implemented new regulations for labour recruiters in the mostly migrant construction industry, with the brokers forced to obtain a city-issued licence before operating.

Authority in a single pair of hands

In Managing the Merchants of Migration, I focus on how state, provincial, territorial and municipal governments in Australia, Canada and the US create unique relationships with the private-sector recruiters that shape migration governance. Contrary to calls by international organisations to bring all actors together in managing cross-border recruitment, I instead find that in most regulations, authority is accumulated by a single stakeholder.

Worker-oriented regulations empower migrants to regulate their own recruitment, but often rely on individuals who are structurally constrained in pursuing enforcement. Recruiter-oriented laws help leverage the resources of the private sector, but in doing so they might suffer from many of the inherent conflicts of interest present in self-regulation. State-oriented regulations strengthen bureaucratic oversight but might lack the help that private-sector and non-governmental organisations can provide in regulating an industry with so many small firms that are often geographically dispersed.

Sharks, padrones and path dependency

The second part of the book examines some 130 years of history, reaching back to the turn of the 20th century, when recruiters with names such as Registry Offices, Padrones, Sharks and Intelligence Offices managed movement.

Analysis demonstrates that recruiters have been central to recruitment for over a century, but that they have worked closely with lower levels of government rather than in isolation. Furthermore, history shows that governments have regulated the recruiters with the same lopsided methods for more than a century. In looking at the actors, the institutions and even the ideas that explain the continuation of such one-sided laws, I find that historical actors consolidated authority, politi­cal institutions continually favoured certain groups over others, and past ideas shaped framings of fault and responsibility surrounding exploitation. As gov­ernments have been incentivised to keep asymmetric regulations for recruiters, the frequent abuse of low-wage migrants has persisted in a way that damages migration governance. Especially in the complex, triangular world of migrant employment, ideas are key in shaping how recruiters, employers and governments, and even migrants themselves, receive different amounts of blame for abuse and responsibility for solving it.

Learning from the past

This book is written for students and scholars of migration, public policy and labour history, and for the policymakers, unions, employers and civil society organisations working to make human movement fairer.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution that eliminates recruiter abuse. Findings instead highlight how laws should create an integrated enforcement network, empower bottom-up initiatives, and be tailored to each community. Subnational governments have long been on the front lines of creating more ethical recruitment and should be better supported in the future.

Just because it might be difficult to break old habits in creating more effective recruiter regulations does not mean that it is impossible. Altering historical trajectories requires bottom-up regulations that integrate all stakeholders in supporting ethical recruitment. To get there, low-wage migrant workers themselves need to be better empowered to regulate their own recruitment processes.

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Edward Mohr is Migrant Integration Coordinator for the City of Aachen, Germany.