Migration industry

The migration industry is an emerging concept in the field of migration. Human geographers have embraced this concept in order to better understand how a wide range of nonstate actors shape migration and mobility patterns through the services they offer. As a reference to the role of commercial services in migration, the notion of the migration industry has a long history that links in the mobility of people with new services of facilitation and control. This is evident in a wide range of migratory types from irregular border crossing and asylum seeking through to privileged forms of international relocation and student migration. The value of the migration industry concept lies in the fact that it takes us further from neoclassical push-pull accounts of migration by enabling accounts of migration that see this as ongoing, fragmented, and negotiated, and fundamentally linked to a migrant's position within global structures of power.