Conference Agenda

The literature on global teacher migration is replete with the acknowledgment of teaching as a mobile career (Manik, 2005; Bense, 2016) and south-north teacher migration has always drawn criticism from a human capital optic. However, this has glossed over the realities of what Hall (2019) references as a relationship between ‘the west’ and ‘the rest’. This paper leans on several studies detailing SA migrant teachers trajectories to ‘the west’ and ‘middle east’ unpacking critical caveats for the phenomenon of teacher migration from South Africa through a decolonial political economy lens focussing on teacher recruitment leading to the exit and experiences of SA migrant teachers abroad. The dominant discourse of teacher shortages are revealed as a veneer hiding neocolonialism, cultural hegemony and racism. Symbolic interactions between the UK, EU and the AU are revealing, for example with the EU referencing Africa as ‘the sister continent’ ignoring colonial undertones in the relationship. Teacher recruitment policies signal a blatant disregard of recognition of teaching qualifications of SA teachers and their colleagues from Africa, a purveyor of ‘colonial violence’ that has endured. The discussion then navigates to findings from a policy analysis of the African Union migration stance through selected protocols and policies: as evidenced in regional policy suggestions and migration policy frameworks which are captured in the Migration Policy Framework for Africa and the Plan of Action 2018-2030.

Migration brokerage is often studied from the perspective of the actions brokers take to facilitate or regulate the mobility of migrants. Brokers play various roles within migration infrastructures, ranging from recruiting, placing, and shaping 'ideal' workers in alignment with employer expectations and state regulations, to categorizing and evaluating workers' skills, as well as managing the direction and movement of migrant workers. Furthermore, they navigate through different types of boundaries, including legal, bureaucratic, and linguistic, in order to facilitate mobility. Moving beyond mere descriptions of brokerage practices, this paper contextualizes brokerage within specific institutional frameworks and raises the question of what factors enable or limit the scope of commercial brokerage in contemporary migration landscape. Using the case of Nepal-Malaysia migration corridor and using ethnographically informed qualitative methods to seek answer to the question raised, the findings of this paper suggests that much of how Nepali brokers within this corridor act is a result of their interaction with the Nepalese state and the existing framework of rules and regulations that they negotiate on an everyday basis. Combining insights from sociology and migration studies, this paper demonstrates that studying the socio-structural location of brokers, vis-a-vis state interventions around the management of migration, illustrates the unique positionality of migration brokers that can generate opportunities for migrant workers, but also create systemic vulnerabilities. Using the empirical example of run-away migrants within the Nepal-Malaysia corridor, I show how brokers occupy a contradictory socio-structural location that acts as the source of both exploitation and protection of workers on the move. In so doing, the paper is able to draw a conceptualization of how brokerage as a practice is a product of an underlying institutional space, and not a result of "an arbitrary distribution of interlinked human and non-human actors", as has been claimed by recent migration scholars.

This paper examines the ‘middle-men’ of migration - business entities who recruit, train, deploy and manage migrant domestic workers in their migration trajectory. They are part of a burgeoning ‘migration industry’, and are increasingly essential non-state actors in global migration governance. While all kinds of human mobilities now take on a ‘logic of commodification and exchange’ this logic is under-examined, especially in this category of worker. This paper aims to flesh out the market logic or authority of the migration industry as non-state actors in their everyday activities. It does so by examining training centres in the largest domestic-worker sending (Philippines, Indonesia) and receiving (Singapore, Malaysia) countries in Southeast Asia.

The paper looks into why recruitment and placement agencies play such an outsized role in domestic worker migration and examine their relations with employers, workers and state apparatuses. It argues that these relations comprise neoliberal migration governance – a governmental rationality that cedes authority to the market. This mode of governance creates market value which not only benefits these businesses but also state actors in in what are essentially public-private partnerships.

To produce ‘quality maids’, the Indonesian and Philippine migration bureaucracies have developed an accreditation system of training centres, trainers and assessors. In coordination with the migration industry, these government offices develop curricula standards and evaluation materials of student-trainees. Government officials also conduct their examination and issue certificates to out-going domestic workers. ‘Quality control’ then supposedly weeds out those who are not likely to complete their contracts, posing a problem to agencies, the government and employers. What I call ‘management’ entails attempts of agencies to enforce the terms of the employment contract, negotiate work conditions, and advocate for days off among other ‘benefits.’ It also entails conflict resolution between employer and worker in what is euphemistically called ‘counselling.’ Management includes directing domestic workers’ leisure time to ‘productive’ pursuits. Finally, agencies shape the scope conditions of workers’ temporariness (as opposed to integration or settlement).