This book responds to the growing presence of “middle elements”—intermediaries and migration agents—in the facilitation of labour migration and advances an economic sociological explanation for their rising relevance in the contemporary migration landscape. Rather than treating the proliferation of agents as an organic development of neoliberal capitalism or attributing migrant precarity solely to their mediation, the book reconceptualizes brokerage as an institutionally constituted and contested market of migration services. It argues that a market perspective offers fresh insights into why migration agents consolidate into a durable industry, how brokerage serves the interests of labour exporting, remittance-dependent emigration states such as Nepal, and why intermediaries persist despite the stabilization of migrant social networks and the expansion of state mechanisms that replicate and attempt to replace commercial brokerage. By examining market organization, the sedimentation of its practices, and struggles over market legitimacy, the book reveals how brokerage reshapes state– market relations, governance structures, and migrant labour processes for readers interested in migration, sociology of work, labour and migration policy.

Sandhya A.S. is Postdoctoral Researcher in the German Research Foundation (DFG) funded Research Training Group “Cross-border labor markets: Transnational market makers, infrastructures, institutions”, at the Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, Germany. Her research and publications combine ethnographic and sociological approaches to the study of migrant labour markets, welfare and migrant social protection, immobility, brokerage, and state–market linkages.