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ABSTRACT
Migration brokers and the organization of human mobility did 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.
KEYWORDS: Brokers, freedom, history, law, migration
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5509/201285121
How did the box become black? Why do we know so little about migration brokers and the infrastructure of migration? It was not always this way. For at least 300 years before the 1920s, understandings of migration around the world were dominated by issues of recruitment, financing, transportation and linking migrants to potential employers. Officials, lawmakers, muckraking journalists and moralistic crusaders all had a deep interest in brokers. These concerns died away in the early twentieth century, alongside the rise of border control and the accompanying construction of the free, self-motivated individual as the proper subject of immigration law and theory.1 The broker as a person or institution who connected potential migrants to transportation and opportunities abroad became a shadowy figure,...