Mapping the “middle-spaces” of migration: towards a linked ecology approach to migration industry, migration infrastructure, and migration brokerage

Abstract

1. Introduction

Recently, scholarly literature on international migration has increasingly focused on the “middle space” of migration (Kern and Müller-Böker 2015), shifting emphasis from analyses centered on countries of origin or destination to investigating the actors, practices, and infrastructures that facilitate, sustain, and solidify movement across borders (e.g. Collyer 2007). Over the past decade, the “migrant trajectory” approach has advanced this direction by moving away from static methods—including multi-sited approaches—to mobile methods that involve following migrants’ journeys and documenting the encounters and frictions between these trajectories and coercive “migration regimes” (Schapendonk and Steel 2014; Schapendonk et al. 2020). In this article, we continue this endeavor by proposing a conceptual framework based on “migration routes.” Importantly, in doing so, we also shift the focus from a migrant-centered perspective to the social, spatial, and temporal structures that sustain and regulate human mobilities. This empirical and conceptual shift—from mobility itself to its conditions of possibility—is based on the observation that migration is a heavily mediated process and that mobility is produced and configured through a diverse set of spatially distributed actors, each with different motivations, and resources. Building on this observation, Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh (2012: 8) called for “opening the black box of migration” to “illuminate the broader infrastructure that makes mobility possible.” To account for this “thick” social formation connecting migrants’ places of origin, transit, and destination, and to understand how circulation is produced and sustained in these translocal spaces—which may extend to shape transnational social fields (Levitt and Glick-Schiller 2004; Glick-Schiller 2005)—three broad and often overlapping analytical strategies have been developed.

First, some authors have expanded on the notion of the “migration industry” by conceptualizing migration facilitation and regulation activities as a “trade.” While the term “migration industry” often connotes pejorative meanings, scholars have argued that attending to the migration industry challenges the state-centricity of migration governance. This serves to remind us that by outsourcing certain functions of migration governance to the migration industry, the state saves costs, ensures flexibility, avoids blame and circumvents the need for formal cooperation with migrant-sending countries while still retaining regulatory authority (Goh, Wee, and Yeoh 2017). In short, the state orders migration through the migration industry’s pursuit of profit, and co-opts the industry in fashioning migrants as governable legal subjects.

Second, in the past decade, the concept of “migration infrastructures” has emerged, examining the material and immaterial infrastructures that support and enable mobility. By focusing on “those who move migrants rather than the migrants themselves” (Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh 2012: 9), the infrastructural turn in migration studies brings to light socio-material assemblages that shape mobility but tend to remain invisible. As Leurs (2023: 26) puts it, invisibility “hide[s] power dynamics, mak[ing] forms of exclusion and exploitation possible and limit[ing] the means to accountability or contestation.”

Third, the literature on “brokerage” has explored mobility as a product of intermediation practices. As a category of practice, migration brokerage revolves around “indeterminate and emergent practices unfolding through unpredictable encounters among diverse and transregionally located actors, bureaucratic objects, and impractical procedures contingent on institutional cultures” (Shrestha and Yeoh 2018: 663–4). In as much as “brokerage” is an indefinite and variable set of practices, the figure of the migration broker—ranging from recruiters, smugglers, travel agents, transport providers, humanitarian organizations, immigration lawyers, and housing and placement agents—is ambiguous in social, moral, and historical terms, occupying a place of in-betweenness that is positioned to multiply social relations and maximize access to resources and networks.

In this article, we review these three bodies of literature, highlighting their many contributions while also addressing certain internal tensions and differences in their respective approaches. We proceed in two steps: first, we work through a deconceptualization phase by leveraging the notion of migration routes, proposing that they can be conceptualized as networks of interconnected places and segments linking origins, transit points, and destinations. This reframing allows us to apply Andrew Abbott’s concept of “linked ecologies,” to illuminate the layered relations and interactions among actors, infrastructures, and practices that sustain these routes. By focusing on how these elements coalesce into segments, and how segments, as discrete ecologies, interlink and assemble into coherent migration routes, the ecological approach provides a fresh analytical lens, connecting multiple entities, practices and levels of interaction and highlighting the dynamic structuring forces at play. Through this approach, we demonstrate how linked ecologies enable a more integrative understanding of migration routes as complex, adaptive networks.

2. Capturing the middle-spaces of migration: migration industry, migration infrastructures, and migration brokerage

2.1 Transnational mobilities and the “migration industries”

Referring to the role of commercial services in migration, the notion of the “migration industry” has a long history linking migration with new services of facilitation and control (Cranston et al. 2018). From the transatlantic slave trade to the export of Chinese indentured “coolie” labor to different parts of European empires, the migration industry has played a key role in the business of moving people across borders and large distances. In recent times, the securitization of borders and the expansion of temporary migration schemes have been accompanied by the rapid rise of a wide range of commercial intermediaries who organize, channel, and facilitate migration flows. Because migration regimes have become increasingly restrictive and complex, the demand for these intermediaries with the expertise to navigate labyrinthine migration regulations has ballooned. With the parametric rise of new markets and destinations where social networks are particularly weak, recruitment agencies have stepped in to supply information, promote opportunities and routes, and link the labor markets at source and destination. As Deshingkar (2019: 2638) explains, the migration industry not only acts as an extension of the state seeking to outsource border controls, it also “collud[es] with employers to cheapen and commoditise migrant labour.”

Driven by economic logics but taking different forms, the “migration industry” encompasses the multifaceted actors that enable, maintain, control, and strengthen the movement of migrants between their countries of origin and destination (Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh 2012; Cranston et al. 2018; Deshingkar 2019). Scholars in the field argue that comprehending the particular dynamics of this milieu is critical in understanding migration outcomes, including the emergence and decline of migration flows or individual migration patterns such as migration, settlement, re-migration, stepwise migration (Paul 2011), return migration, “re-routing” (Schapendonk et al. 2020) and so on (Gammeltoft‐Hansen and Nyberg Sørensen 2013).

Actors of the migration industry are mostly moved by economic interest (Hernández-León 2013). Gammeltoft‐Hansen and Nyberg Sørensen (2013) thus hold that the migration industry is driven by the “commercialization of international migration,” where numerous “entrepreneurs” capitalize and strive on the commodification of migration and the provision of migration-related services, whether legal, irregular, or criminalized (Surak 2013)—travel agents, recruiters, fixers, brokers, jurists, private security contractors, etc. All actors—public or private, legal, irregular, or criminalized—involved in generating, shaping, sustaining, and regulating migration flows in pursuit of economic profit within the “markets for migration” are considered part of this industry. In this literature, the main analytical strategy thus revolves around identifying and examining the full range of economic opportunities and value generated by the shaping of international migrations—either through facilitation or control—the actors involved in generating and capturing this value, and understanding the logics of action implemented by these actors in order to maximize their benefits and reduce their risks (Garapich 2008; Hernández-León 2013).

Private actors, whether legal, irregular, or criminalized, such as brokers and recruiters, profit from charging fees for their services (Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh 2012; Debonneville 2021). States also demonstrate economic interests in migration, as they may benefit from remittances from migrant workers, seek to attract low-paid and high-skilled migrants for economic development (Surak 2018; Bastide 2021), or profit from the migration industry, framed as a national economic sector (Bastide 2015). In the case of Singapore, Wee, Goh, and Yeoh (2019) argue that state policies on migrant domestic workers are heavily shaped by the drive to maintain a “flexible, low-cost labor force” that contributes to the country’s economic growth, while highly-skilled expatriates are coveted to serve the needs of high-growth/knowledge intensive economic sectors (Yeoh 2006; Liu-Farrer et al., 2021). If the migration industry is driven by economic interest, these instances also show that profit-oriented motivations need to be situated within a context shaped by diverse and constraining social, political, and cultural factors, which influence the actions and strategies of the actors involved in migration processes (Massey 1998; Lindquist 2012; Gammeltoft-Hansen and Nyberg Sørensen 2013).

The literature on the migration industry provides a unifying framework based on economic interest as a principle of action and association. This helps account for the heterogeneity and cooperation of actors involved in facilitating, sustaining, and regulating international migration flows, such as brokers, recruiters, lawyers, and nation-states with their own interests in migration (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Nyberg Sørensen 2013; Xiang and Lindquist 2014; Lin et al. 2017; Baas 2020). Furthermore, its empirical approach to migration governance enables moving beyond simplistic distinctions between public and private actors, as well as between legal, irregular, and criminalized practices, to uncover the complex interactions that shape migration. However, the economic perspective has not been fully realized, as it would necessitate the incorporation of robust economic analysis grounded in specialized fields of study such as economic geography, economic sociology, economic anthropology, or economics itself. Indeed, the current use of economic terminology in the literature is somewhat vague, inconsistent, and underdeveloped, which may hinder its analytical clarity and limit the understanding of the intricate dynamics involved in migration processes, even when considering solely their economic dimension.

The loose use of economic concepts is perhaps most evident in the notion of “industry.” In fact, the literature generally employs the term metaphorically without providing a substantial definition, leading to a loss of precision and consistency. This results in the conflation of two distinct meanings: one suggesting that migration is undergoing “industrialization” involving processes of rationalization, scaling up, massification, and institutionalization; and another implying the development of a specific craft or trade related to transnational mobilities, with its specific actors, know-hows, competences, and practices. Establishing a clear distinction between these dimensions would enable the exploration of a broader range of topics, and, importantly, the connections between them. Scale-making processes involve the transformation of practice, and the partial industrialization of the “trade” likely gives rise to new assemblages between spaces, temporalities, actors and practices. Forms of industrial rationalization coexist with and leverage less formalized practices, as local actors often engage in the migration industry in a peripheral and intermittent manner, treating it as a supplementary source of income, reminiscent of the putting-out system (Wallerstein 2011). This results in heterogeneous economic formations, and displays such topological complexity as described and analyzed in the literature on the variegated forms of neoliberalism (Ong 2006; Brenner, Peck, and Theodore 2010).

Furthermore, the focus on market logics, trade and profits also limits the ability to embrace the breadth of the middle-spaces¹ of migration, which greatly exceeds the sole perimeter of economic transactions and rationalities (see for instance Tarrius and Missaoui 2000; Ma Mung 2006; Simon, 2008; Roulleau-Berger, Krasteva, and Rea 2011). There is thus a need to decommodify the perspective on migration routes to account for the multi-dimensional practices, actors, and motivations that contribute to generating, sustaining, and regulating pathways.

In sum, the “migration industry” concept has spawned productive explanatory frameworks that go beyond zooming in on individual migrant agency to take into account the role of market-driven assemblages in producing, channeling and calibrating migration flows. Yet, for the reasons outlined above, it tends to provide a thin account of economic motivation and rationality for how, why and where people are moved. As elaborated later, we suggest that the concept of “linked ecologies” proposed by Andrew Abbott (2005) is better suited for building thick accounts of the bewildering variety of actors and practices that aggregate and enable the circulation of migrants.

2.2 Transnational mobilities and migration infrastructures

The migration industry literature leverages economic interests to identify the actors involved in enabling mobility, as well as their motivations and logics of action. In contrast, the “migration infrastructures” literature employs a materialist perspective on migration, inspired by the “infrastructural turn” in social sciences (Larkin 2013). In this context, the literature focuses on the essential means of mobility, considering that migration relies on various material and immaterial resources and capabilities, suggesting that these infrastructures are not only instrumental in facilitating migration, but also actively shape the ways in which migrants move and experience their journeys (Lin et al. 2017). While the migration industry literature delimits its subject matter through the lens of economic interest and strategic action, the migration infrastructure literature focuses on identifying all the resources involved in supporting mobility, the processes of connection between discrete infrastructure components, and explores how these assemblages reconfigure human milieus and circulation patterns (Kleist and Bjarnesen 2019).

In their seminal paper, Xiang and Lindquist (2014) thus define migration infrastructures as “the systematically interlinked technologies, institutions, and actors that facilitate and condition mobility” (2014: 22). The authors go on to identify five types of infrastructures: (1) regulatory, (2) technological, (3) organizational, (4) social, and (5) informational. Regulatory infrastructures refer to the legal frameworks and policies governing migration, while technological infrastructures encompass transportation and communication systems. Organizational infrastructures are the institutions and agencies that assist or control migration, and social infrastructures include networks of family, friends, and fellow migrants. Finally, informational infrastructures involve the knowledge and information that enable migration decisions.

Subsequent research has primarily broadened the application of this conceptual framework without significantly altering its conceptual underpinnings. This expansion has progressed along three avenues: First, new case studies have supplemented the initial reflections, which were based on research conducted in China and Indonesia (Chau and Schwiter 2021; Sigona, Kato, and Kuznetsova 2021; Bell and Molland 2022). Second, studies have refined the conceptualization of migration infrastructures by broadening the initial typology (such as including repatriation infrastructure—see Liao, 2023), by focusing on specific types (Lindquist 2018; Collins 2021; Düvell and Preiss 2022) such as “arrival infrastructures” (Meeus, Arnaut, and van Heur 2019), or by examining their functioning (Chang 2018; Mosselson 2021), maintenance, and repair under times of crisis and duress (Chan 2023; Koh 2024; Cheng et al. 2024). Finally, authors have proposed methodological approaches to study migration infrastructures (Khan 2020; Teunissen 2021).

The first key difference between the migration industry and migration infrastructures literature lies in the scale of analysis. The migration industry literature mainly adopts a systemic, macro-social perspective, focusing on the larger systems of actors and structures that underpin and enable migration (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Nyberg Sørensen 2013; Surak 2013). In contrast, the migration infrastructures literature embraces a meso-social approach, scrutinizing the interplay between human and non-human “actants” (Latour 2008) and the material and immaterial resources that support migration processes (Xiang and Lindquist 2014). This perspective allows for a more nuanced and contextualized analysis of the diverse factors and relationships that shape migration experiences at a local level.

The second fundamental difference between the two bodies of literature concerns their conception of agency and social action. The migration industry literature tends to emphasize the role of economic interests and instrumental rationality in shaping the actions of individuals and organizations involved in regulating migration (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Nyberg Sørensen 2013), in a “strategic action field” (Fligstein and McAdam 2011). In contrast, although it is often not explicitly laid out, the migration infrastructures literature is more focused on the relational, emergent nature of agency, highlighting how action is a distributed property of specific arrangements of material and immaterial resources and involves plural rationalities (Xiang and Lindquist 2014).

The literature on migration infrastructures remains predominantly focused on Asia (Xiang and Lindquist 2014; Yeoh 2021). There is still much work to be done to fully develop its analytical consequences. In particular, migration infrastructures can be divided between those specifically developed to regulate migration flows and those repurposed to participate in circulating migrants (Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh 2012). Many infrastructural components serve both local and translocal or transnational purposes. For example, fishing boats on the Senegalese coast contribute to local fisheries while also facilitating the crossing of migrants to the Canary Islands (Andersson 2014). Different types of migrants may utilize other infrastructures, as demonstrated by the complex systems developed to facilitate the pilgrimage of Indonesian Muslims to Mecca, which have also long been used for migration smuggling and/or human trafficking (Spaan 1994; Spaan, Hillmann, and van Naserssn 2005). Furthermore, specialized migration infrastructures can become important local institutions by utilizing locally sourced resources to function and generating new local resources—such as job opportunities. This is evident in border cities where the local economy has been restructured to accommodate the needs of the migration industry (Sassen 2001).

Migration infrastructures can thus be specified according to how they articulate different spatial and practical orders, bridging the “nomadic spaces” of migration and the “sedentary spaces” of localities (Tarrius and Missaoui 2000). These infrastructures structure moorings and routes at local, translocal, and transnational levels, highlighting the complex interplay between various spatial scales (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013). Here again, as will be discussed in a later section, the idea of linked ecologies enables a rethinking of migration infrastructures as Janus-faced in serving both the local and the transnational, thus allowing us to simultaneously observe how transnational mobilities reconfigure, and are contingent upon, existing ecologies.

2.3 Transnational mobilities and brokerage

2.3.1 Unpacking brokerage

As argued, the migration industry literature focuses on profits and economic rationality and transactions as a principle of association and cooperation to account for the structuration of migration flows; while the migration infrastructure literature foregrounds the plurality of resources and capabilities involved in generating, shaping and sustaining migration. Studies on brokerage, on the other hand, focus on a specific figure—the broker—and a specific practice—intermediation. It is worth stressing that this strand of research clearly overlaps with the two other bodies of work (Lindquist 2012, 2015, 2017, 2018; Xiang 2013; Xiang and Lindquist 2014; Lin et al. 2017; Baas 2020), as brokers are seen as critical players in the migration industry (providing linkages between its different sites) and as the primary assemblers of migration infrastructures (Koster and Van Leynseele 2018; Lindquist 2018; Shrestha and Yeoh 2018).

Recently, the literature on migration brokerage has gained momentum, outpacing the other two strands of literature and leading to notable developments. This is somewhat unsurprising, given that brokers have been identified as critical components in the other two approaches. Moreover, precisely for this reason, key proponents of the migration infrastructures literature have been actively involved in developing this new line of inquiry. Given its increasing centrality, this approach merits special attention and more space, both for presentation and discussion, as it has evolved into a crossroads where the three strands of literature intersect through the figure of the broker and the practice of brokerage.

Brokers’ functions in relation to the migration industry and migration infrastructure have been characterized in various ways by different authors. Some see brokers as a byproduct of the migration industry (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Nyberg Sørensen 2013), while others view them as its fundamental building block (Hernández-León 2008). Alternatively, brokers are considered to be both “embedded in and productive of migration infrastructures” (Shrestha and Yeoh 2018; Wee, Goh, and Yeoh 2020). These characterizations reflect different stances regarding the determinants of social action, although the epistemological perspectives underlying these views are not explicitly stated.

As a social type, brokers encompass a bewildering variety of concrete actors, from human smugglers (Spener 2009; Nyberg–Sørensen 2013) to civil servants (Cranston, Schapendonk, and Spaan 2017) or private services providers (Hernández-León 2008), from individuals to organizations (Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh 2012). Beyond this diversity, brokers are analytically grouped based on a shared practice: intermediation. Brokers enable migrants to connect with various sites of the migration industry, including legal, irregular, and criminalized networks (Spaan and Hillmann 2013). These sites can be understood both literally, as collections of geographic locations (e.g., home places, training centers, shelters, workplaces, etc.), and metaphorically, as various “locales” of the migration industry that bring together specific sets of actors and infrastructures to perform different functions. Examples of these actors include private entities like recruitment and placement companies, transportation firms, security companies with migration control mandates, legal counselors, CSOs, and financial institutions, as well as public agencies such as immigration services, judicial systems, ministries of home affairs and labor, and city councils, each performing different functions in the migration industry. Brokerage assemblages also go beyond physical sites to leverage digital platforms that cut across human and non-human actors to reach a wider clientele, and in the process transform migrants’ experiential meaning-making practices (Leurs 2023: 32).

As predominantly profit-seeking actors, brokers capitalize on their monopoly over mobility resources. The proliferation of obstacles on migration routes, such as those generated by increasingly restrictive migration policies (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Nyberg Sørensen 2013), expands their field of operations and economic opportunities. Through their intermediation practices, brokers assist migrants in leaving their country of origin (Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh 2012), navigating the migration industry (Schapendonk 2018), integrating into host societies (Ambrosini 2017), and returning after their stay (Faist 2014). As such, brokers are predominantly seen as facilitators who monetize their ability to smooth out migration journeys (Spaan 1994; Salt and Stein 1997; Hernández-León 2008; Agunias 2009; Spener 2009). To achieve this, they typically engage in a range of intermediation practices, encompassing formal and informal, legal, regular, and criminalized activities (Agunias 2009; Bastide 2015). Furthermore, brokers often exhibit moral ambiguity, as they may act altruistically, exploitatively, or both, with respect to migrants’ interests and well-being (Salt and Stein 1997; Hernández-León 2008; Spener 2009).

Consequently, intermediation practices occur within an extensive operational space, where brokers can assemble discrete segments of migration infrastructures to bypass specific obstacles (Bastide 2015: 109–29). This may include circumventing legal requirements associated with emigration or immigration policies in home, transit or destination countries or evading negative encounters with irregular or criminal actors. This broad space of operation also implies that brokers can configure migration infrastructures to circumvent the migration industry, by allowing migrants to achieve their journey without paying off lucrative intermediaries: in this sense, brokers can play against the migration industry by decomodifying migration—an aspect that remains underexplored in the existing literature.

Migration brokerage can thus enable migrants to maximize the outcomes of their migration by assembling migration infrastructures in ways that minimize the costs and risks associated with the migration industry. Conversely, brokers may also have an incentive to create obstacles and hurdles, for example, by privatizing and concealing crucial information, thus potentially establishing an exploitative bias in migration brokerage (Bastide 2015). From the perspective of migrants, the ambiguity of the figure of the broker is obvious, as intermediation can become a vehicle for empowerment or result in subjection, objectification, and exploitation.

Given its pivotal role in assembling migration infrastructures and linking diverse sites within the migration industry, intermediation significantly impacts migration outcomes at a structural level and for individual migrants. This influence extends to places and countries of origin, transit, and destination, as it plays a crucial role in shaping migration flows and migrants’ experiences.

At a macro-political scale, competing or conflicting logics and modes of action among brokers, as well as between brokers and public authorities, pose challenges for policy-making and enforcement in source, transit, and destination countries. This is due in part to brokers’ ability to channel migration through legal, irregular, or criminalized pathways. Such challenges impact the social, political, economic, and cultural integration processes in destination countries and the corresponding outcomes of migration in home and transit localities.

At a micro level, the role of brokerage significantly influences migration outcomes for individual migrants. Empirically, it is well attested that intermediation processes can place migrants in states of “conditionality” (Wee, Goh, and Yeoh 2019), “deportability” (De Genova 2002), “precariousness” (Deshingkar 2019) and “subjection” (Chang 2018). These conditions contribute to migrants’ vulnerability (Deshingkar 2019), which may be generated through irregularization, legal procedures, or a combination of both. It can then be monetized by actors in the migration industry, for instance through the development of exploitative work processes (Bastide 2021). Conversely—and this has attracted much less attention—brokerage can also result in greater autonomy and agency, by allowing migrants to circumvent coercive “mobility regimes” (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013).

In sum, the literature on migration brokerage provides rich and more granular insights into the practices of composing migration infrastructures, structuring the migration industry, and thereby maintaining and regulating migration flows. It presents a micro-sociological perspective on social action, where various rationalities are considered. While economic self-interest is often seen as the dominant form of rationality, brokers may also act on extra-economic grounds, reflecting the complexity of their motivations. However, while this literature has made valuable contributions to understanding the structuring processes within the middle-spaces of migration, it also has certain blind spots.

2.3.2 Varieties of intermediations and beyond

The current state of the literature on migration brokerage leads us to formulate two broad sets of remarks: one bearing on the reduction of the wide range of practices on migration routes to intermediation, and the other on the weak specification of intermediation itself as a social practice.

To begin with, the first critique is external to the proposed analytical frameworks. It does not target the concept of brokerage itself but rather discusses the reduction of various practices within the migration industry to intermediation. Indeed, while we acknowledge that intermediation is a crucial practice connecting various components of the migration industry and migration infrastructures, it does not fully encompass the wide range of practices involved in “circulating” migrants. For instance, each site within the migration industry specializes in specific activities—finance, logistics, legal practices, training and education, social service provision, management, marketization, etc.—which are not easily subsumed under the term “intermediation.”

Furthermore, many of these activities involve finer subsets of practices that enable their collective realization. For instance, a transportation company moving migrants towards their destination requires numerous functions to deliver its “brokering” service, such as management, accountancy, maintenance, and more. Since these activities ultimately facilitate migrants’ progression along migration journeys and provide essential capabilities to connect migrants to other sites in the migration industry, they are currently grouped under the overarching concept of intermediation. However, it remains debatable whether the analytical benefits of doing so outweigh the significant loss of empirical granularity. And we could gain from investigating the plurality of figures and practices involved in circulating migrants, beyond brokers and brokerage.

Second, an internal discussion can focus on the concept of intermediation itself. While intermediation is a crucial practice that connects various components of the migration industry and migration infrastructures, it does not fully embrace the wide range of practices involved in “circulating” migrants. This problem stems from the vague definitions of intermediation itself. As long as social life is considered to revolve around transactions between individuals, between individuals and groups, and between groups, the notion of intermediation can be applied to a wide range of social practices without further clarification. Consequently, definitions of brokerage, such as “a process in which an intermediary, the broker, facilitates connections between different actors that may not have previously had any direct relationship with one another” (Cranston, Schapendonk, and Spaan 2017) do little to add analytical clarity. The current need of clearer definitions for brokering or intermediation thus impedes readers from effectively comprehending the empirical varieties involved in “intermediating” between migrants and the actors of the migration industry. Faist (2014) made significant progress in acknowledging this practical complexity by proposing an analytical typology of brokers, based on Georg Simmel’s sociology of forms and the concept of “triadic relation.” However, this approach has its limitations, as it narrowly concentrates on brokerage as a determinant of social inequalities.

Expanding the discussion, if we consider brokerage as a transaction between three actors—be they individuals or organizations—then a vast array of “transfers” (Pannier 2021) comes into view: market and non-market transactions, relevant to Mauss’s “gift economy”; monetary and non-monetary exchanges, including symbolic or social exchanges; distinctions between gifts, exchanges, and transactions; and varying forms of interaction, such as solidarity, reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange. Each of these types of relations generates a unique way of distributing roles and statuses among the participants and entails different outcomes for the stakeholders. By considering this variety, we can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the complex dynamics within the migration industry and of the concept of intermediation.

Together, these points give rise to a much more intricate perspective on “brokerage.” This complexity transforms the elusive and blurry figure of “the broker” as an abstract, general social type into a myriad of more specific figures tied to well-defined practices, relations, roles, and involvement in “migration ecologies.” This opens the opportunity to work towards proposing a systematic typology of brokers and intermediation practices, while current typologies, aside from Faist’s work, tend to be implicit, discontinuous, ad-hoc, and author-specific.

First, within the migration brokerage literature, the focus is predominantly on individual brokers, often overlooking the significant role organizations play in mediating between migrants and other migration actors. Consequently, organizational action is often overlooked, with a few exceptions (Wee, Goh, and Yeoh 2020). More broadly, as Shrestha and Yeoh (2018) have pointed out, we need to pay attention to the local contexts of brokerage. This entails recognizing that intermediation, as a social outcome, always involves complex, “distributed actions” that greatly exceed the transactions between three parties—the migrant, the broker, and the third party to the brokered relation—and requires a “thick” theoretical approach to contextualization. Here again, we must move away from an individualistic perspective on social action.

Next, upon examining the literature, we can retrieve such figures as “informal” and “formal” brokers (Hernández-León 2008; Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh 2012), “altruistic” brokers as opposed to their “opportunistic” counterparts (Salt and Stein 1997; Hernández-León 2008), as well as “private” versus “public,” and “state” versus “market” brokers (Jones and Sha 2020). Other authors focus on the function of specific actors in the migration industry and identify such figures in terms of their role in “regularization” (Agunias 2009) or “integration” (Cranston, Schapendonk, and Spaan 2017) or “arrival” (Hanhörster and Wessendorf 2020) brokers. A richer and systematic typology would allow for refining our understanding of the myriad ways brokers assemble migration infrastructures and articulate the different sites of the migration industry.

3. Expanding perspectives on the middle-spaces of migration: Rethinking migration routes

We are thus faced with two different sets of issues: on the one hand, the three strands of literature are not immune to internal critiques, as we have seen; on the other hand, although there is clearly a cross-pollinating relationship between these approaches, especially between the migration industry and brokerage literature with notable authors contributing to both corpuses, they are built on epistemological frameworks that only partially overlap, even if this aspect is not explicitly addressed.

Regarding the first point, the migration industry literature demonstrates a type of economic reductionism and, paradoxically, has limited engagement with economic concepts. The migration infrastructures literature could benefit from greater attention to their embeddedness in sedentary spatial regimes, and a stronger consideration for the specificity of human actors among the sum of actants participating in circulating migrants. The migration brokerage literature tends to conflate practices involved in circulating migrants under the umbrella notion of intermediation practices (brokerage); it could benefit from greater internal differentiation between types of intermediation and a more developed appreciation of economic transactions, especially in a context where brokerage is largely viewed as a commercial practice. Ultimately, the three approaches could be enriched by a deeper consideration of the spatial dimension of their respective primary objects—the moorings and linkages of economic transactions, the anchoring and bridging of migration infrastructures, and the positioning of intermediation as a crucial space-making practice.

Regarding the second point, the migration industry literature generally foregrounds a highly focused model of social action, primarily based on profit-seeking. The migration brokerage literature presents us with a rather individualistic definition of agency; however, this approach is more sociological, as it broadens the scope of human practices beyond instrumental rationality, although it still retains a strong economic orientation. The migration infrastructures literature, in contrast, appears closer to a type of “methodological situationism” (Collins 1981), emphasizing the importance of the social context and the interactions between various human and non-human actants in shaping social action, leading to an emergent and distributed conception of agency. Moreover, these three bodies of literature could be strengthened by giving more attention to the role of migrants themselves in organizing their own mobilities.

Our goal is not to devise an alternate theoretical framework; more modestly perhaps, we aim to sketch a possible path forward for studying the middle-spaces of migration. This involves delineating basic methodological principles that might guide new research directions and agendas. In doing so, our aim is to open a conceptual space for examining the middle-spaces of migration, allowing for plural rationalities and refined models of agency, a wider range of practices that shape migration routes beyond brokerage, and the complex temporal and spatial layers of migration infrastructures. To achieve this, we suggest moving through a stage of “de-theorizing” (Sassen, 2017) to revisit empirical evidence. This serves as a heuristic strategy for addressing epistemological overlaps and incompatibilities among the three bodies of work. Of course, this approach does not aim to discard all concepts, as that would render description, let alone analysis, unfeasible. Instead, it seeks to ground our exploration in basic analytical categories, thereby minimizing the imposition of extensive theoretical and epistemological assumptions. It does so by putting at the center basic morphological notions of spaces, places, scales, and temporalities.

3.1 The morphology of migration routes: networks, places and segments

The middle-spaces of migration have been studied in the French literature on transnationalism, which has dealt with transnational entrepreneurship, the bazaar economy, poor-to-poor market networks, or the Sahelian space (Simon and Ma Mung 1990; Peraldi 1999, 2005; Bredeloup and Pliez 2005; Tarrius 2010; Brachet, Choplin, and Pliez 2011; Roulleau-Berger 2022). However, this literature tends to focus on migrants themselves, their mobility, and the circulation of material and immaterial goods generated by migration. In this context, the migrant trajectory approach, which focused methodologically on following migrants during their journeys and observing the frictions between their spatial practices and established, often coercive migration regimes, contributed tremendously to the study of the middle-spaces of migration. While recognizing the importance of centering the migrant, we wish to foreground the concept of migration route to move away from focusing on migrants themselves and shift the locus of attention to the material and immaterial spatio-temporal structures that allow and sustain migration.

At the most basic empirical level, the middle-spaces of migration can be approached as the social spaces shaped by the extension of migration routes. We posit that migration routes, in contrast to the more theoretically laden concepts of infrastructure, brokerage, or the migration industry, emerge as a more suitable basic unit of analysis. Indeed, the notion of “migration route” remains largely under-conceptualized; currently, it predominantly exists as a colloquial term lacking specific conceptual definition (Touré and Arab 2023). This lack of substantial theorization enables an inductive re-examination of the middle-spaces of migration.

Migration routes can be minimally conceptualized as temporally and spatially structured networks, consisting of two fundamental elements: places (structurally equivalent to nodes in the vocabulary of social network analysis, but with an additional emphasis on space) and segments (similar to networks’ edges) (Bastide 2015: 86–107). In these “places”—defined as nodal, open socio-spatial formations (Massey 2005)—migration-related practices, infrastructures, and actors operate. Through these operations, segments are formed, which can be viewed as networks of social transactions and material and immaterial infrastructures that are more or less tightly coupled, connecting and integrating specific places of origin, transit, and destination across geographic expanses.

This definition, while broad, also recognizes that such boundaries are relative and fluctuating (Schapendonk et al. 2020). First, the structural position and functions of specific places on particular migration routes, captured at the demographic level, may vary over time. For instance, regions of Ireland and Italy have shifted from being places of departure to transit and/or destination over the past century. More recently, as European borders have been made increasingly impermeable, countries such as Morocco, Turkey, Tunisia, and Libya have emerged as places of protracted waiting and stuckedness for transnational migrants, unable to move further. Second, origin, transit, and destination are relative spatial concepts at an inter-individual level: one person’s place of origin can be someone else’s destination. Third, these qualifications may also vary at the individual level: the meaning and value of particular places can change over time as migrants develop new spatial anchorages and aspirations, affecting their position as transit points, places of origin or destinations. This latter dynamic is evident in migration patterns such as “interpolar migration” (Ma Mung 2000), “stepwise migrations” (Paul 2011), or “re-routing” (Schapendonk et al. 2020).

More broadly, migration routes typically connect each location with a variable range of other places, thereby forming networks of translocal—including transborder—socio-geographic linkages. By examining these basic units, we can start to identify and catalogue the actors, resources (both material and immaterial), and practices that shape migration routes at the empirical level. We can then analyze their principles of emergence, association, articulation, reorganization, regulation, and dislocation by investigating them as dynamic networks of places and segments, thus delineating their evolution across space and time (May and Thrift 2001). This work has yet to be undertaken; our aim here is to suggest a few key points that may serve as initial steps toward advancing in this direction by laying out basic structural properties.

In this framework, migration routes are thus to be seen as assemblages of places and segments. Both entities coalesce into socio-spatial and temporal formations—migration routes—where motion is predominantly generated and sustained through interactions of varying complexity between human stakeholders, and material and immaterial “actants” (as heterogeneous as landscape features, money, roads, GPS devices, vehicles, foodstuffs, housing arrangements, discourses, and so on).

In this context, places can be differentiated by several factors that are crucial to understanding their roles. As an initial typology, with the aim of further refinement, places may be characterized by the following properties: (1) centrality reflects a place’s relative position within migration routes. A high degree of centrality indicates that a place lies at the intersection of a broad range of migration routes and connects to other central locations via multiple segments, whereas lower centrality suggests fewer segments, limited access to other migration routes, and connections with fewer places and/or places of lesser centrality; (2) functional range describes the diversity of roles a place simultaneously performs, either within a single migration route or across multiple routes; (3) temporal trajectory accounts for the changing functions and relative significance of places over time, as routes restructure.

Based on these basic principles, it is thus possible to characterize different types of places. For instance, Agadez (Hamani and Bontianti 2015) and Dirkou (Brachet 2017) in Northern Niger serve as pivotal nodes on the central trans-Saharan routes, acting as critical junctures where most migrants traversing Niger are compelled to stop on their journey to Northern Africa or Europe, thus acting as gateways. These gateways are characterized by many incoming routes but very few outbound routes, limiting migrants’ ability to pursue migration pathways to their desired destination. Places such as Ventimiglia, in Northern Italy, or Calais, in Northern France, play similar roles on migration routes between Italy, France, and the UK. Batam on the other hand, situated in the Riau Archipelago in Indonesia, stands as a crucial node on migration routes between Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore (Lindquist 2009), not necessarily due to its inescapability but because it sits at the convergence of multiple inbound and outbound segments. Batam could thus be characterized as a hub, where migration flows can be distributed among multiple, inbound and outbound, domestic and transnational routes (Paul and Yeoh 2021).

Segments can be distinguished based on at least six factors: (1) Composition, or the specific sets of practices, actors–including migrants–and infrastructures that structure a segment. (2) Route integration points to the number and types of routes on which segments are integrated and operate. (3) Structural position reflects their function within these routes, where certain segments may be more or less central in configuring particular routes and connecting different routes. (4) Spatial features underscore that segments are configured by the type of spaces they cross. These spaces are shaped by available infrastructures that have been assembled or repurposed to facilitate migration (e.g. airways, railways, roads, trails, vehicles, communication channels) (Pallister-Wilkins 2022). Additionally, they are influenced by the terrain itself (e.g. sea, desert, jungle, mountains, cartel-controlled territories, war zones), where landscape features may emerge as central “actants.” As part of “more-than-human” agentive assemblages (Whatmore 2002), these features significantly affect how segments are structured and navigated (Schindel 2016, 2022). (5) Processual trajectories indicate that segments are characterized by their reconfigurations over time, affecting their orientation and organization within migration routes. (6) Legal alignment describes the (mis)alignment and (dis)connection of practices with variable and discontinuous legal frameworks governing migration on a given segment, notably in facilitating or obstructing the crossing of national borders.

As for actors, migrations can be facilitated and/or controlled—that is, regulated—by a diversity of public entities and private actors, such as translocal or transnational family or community networks, private companies, and NGOs (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Nyberg Sørensen 2013; Andersson 2014; Pacciardi and Berndtsson 2022). These actors encompass different entities, from individuals—such as calo in Indonesia (Spaan 1994; Lindquist 2012)—to groups, or organizations, such as state agencies, smuggling syndicates, or private companies, among others, as seen through both the migration industry and infrastructures literatures. Second, these actors’ degree of involvement can vary widely, from full commitment (e.g. many labor recruitment companies in Indonesia operate strictly in this field of activity) to partial (such as fishermen moonlighting as smugglers or homeowners renting rooms to people on the move) to impromptu (when, for instance, a driver picks up hitchhiking migrants). Third, these actors can further be delineated by the set of practices they execute in assembling migration routes. While a comprehensive typology needs to be developed, such practices can range from logistics and/or procurement (including, but not limited to, transportation, housing, feeding, communication, and managing administrative requirements), to regulation (legislative and regulatory bodies, but also moral entrepreneurs) and enforcement (which involves not only creating and enforcing laws related to migration but also de facto regulation by entities like crime syndicates), finance and funding (covering activities like money-lending or managing remittance flows and savings), counselling and information, or security and protection (including state agencies or NGOs aimed at advocating for, rescuing, or assisting migrants), among other activities. Brokerage, or intermediation, is certainly a pivotal practice that may be part of, or serve as a bridge to, these functions, emphasizing the critical interconnectedness of the migration regulation ecosystem. In addition to accounting for the diversity of practices, it needs to be noted that brokerage actors develop patterns of action that are contextual and may shift, responding to various motives, at the individual or group level, ranging from self-interest to solidarity. This highlights the fluid nature of the motivations driving their participation in regulating migration. Finally, these patterns of action are instrumental in shaping the attitudes of involved actors towards migrants, influencing the manner in which they engage with, exploit, condemn, or support migrants through their journey.

Of course, migration routes, along with the networks of places they aggregate, the segments that link these places, and the networks of actors and practices assembling them, are neither homogeneous nor do they create uniform landscapes. On the contrary, they tend to be highly heterogeneous and hierarchized. Indeed, in organizing migration flows, routes, nodes, segments, practices and actors assume roles that vary from highly structuring to more peripheral. From the perspective of a specific destination or place of origin, migration routes are highly uneven in the types of migration they contribute to produce and reproduce—ranging from “elite migration” (Cranston 2017) to migrations “from below” in their various forms—as well as in their demographic significance. They also differ in their spatial and temporal structuration, including their length (in both distance and number of segments) and temporalities, characterized by the tensions between, and sequencing of, mobility and immobilization.

In sum, places differ in centrality, depending on their position and functions within a particular migration route or at the intersections between multiple routes. They are more or less directly connected through segments of varying complexity (in terms of sets of actors, infrastructures and practices) and types (e.g. official, irregular, criminalized; degree of facilitation, resistance, or obstruction) to a wider or more limited set of places of differing centrality. Segments, in turn, also vary in their capacity to capture and channel migration flows, as well as in the types of pathways they sustain and reproduce—such as “mixed” migration flows, elite migration, asylum seekers, and others. Ultimately, stakeholders’ relative positions can range from ancillary to central, with some emerging as critical gatekeepers with monopolistic power—such as governments within government-to-government (G2G) migration systems—while others face intense competition to provide services to migrants and struggle to make ends meet.

In conceptualizing migration routes as socio-spatial, temporal, and infrastructural outcomes of the convergence of actors, practices, and resources around human mobilities, a critical question emerges: how do these elements coalesce into contested or cooperative forms of coordinated action beyond mere economic interest? Through what types of processes and interactions are these highly diverse socio-material formations—smugglers, civil servants, private companies, individual entrepreneurs, government agencies, CSOs, IOs, informal workers, digital tools, vehicles, roads, ports and airports, accommodations, geographies, and more—brought together and assembled around human mobilities?

From this perspective, we consider that migration routes emerge through the more or less contingent interactions among sited actors, practices, and infrastructures. These entities are structured into ecologies that, in turn, contribute to shaping migration routes. Each segment functions as an ecology in its own right, interlocking with others to form migration routes. By characterizing these interactions, the “linked ecologies” framework provides an analytical outlook that reveals how diverse elements coalesce within specific segments and across entire migration routes. We thus arrive at both a morphological representation of migration routes and a set of analytical tools to examine their dynamic processes of assemblage.

3.2 The linked ecologies of migration routes

According to Abbott (2005, 2016), the social world comprises and is structured by co-evolving ecologies. He defines an ecology as “[…] a social structure that is best understood in terms of interactions between multiple elements that are neither fully constrained, nor fully independent.” Thus, “‘[e]cology’ […] names a social structure that is less unified than a machine or an organism, but that is considerably more unified than is a social world made up of the autonomous, atomic beings of classical liberalism or the probabilistically interacting rational actors of microeconomics.” This approach to the fundamental debate between methodological individualism and varieties of “methodological holisms” (Tsing 2010), which has been ongoing since the birth of sociology, allows the incorporation of various types of rationalities, agency, and (inter)actions. Furthermore, without undermining, and potentially even strengthening, Abbott’s central thesis, it is possible to expand his framework by highlighting that the relationships between actors and places are mediated by infrastructures—assemblages of material and immaterial components, that allow, support, frame and are shaped by (inter)actions. Or, more accurately perhaps, that actors, places and infrastructures are mutually constitutive. Additionally, these inter-relations are spatially distributed and evolving, rendering ecologies—as with any social object—socio-spatial and temporal formations. Incidentally, this extension also links the discussion back to the concept of urban ecology from the first Chicago School of Sociology, the original proponent of the ecological approach to social phenomena, which was very much concerned with the spatial patterning of urban processes.

In Abbott’s view, each ecology is organized by relatively stable yet evolving sets of relations, which he calls “ligations,” between groups of actors and categories of specific objects that structure the stakes within a particular “region” of the social realm, which he terms “locations.” Each ecology revolves around a specific type of location, which can only be captured and qualified by means of empirical investigation. In the ecology of professions—Abbott’s main field of investigation—locations thus take the form of sets of tasks, such as health care, which are both generated and captured by specific professional domains. In the context of human mobilities, the mooring of migration routes in new places reshapes local contexts, by introducing new locations, which can be preempted by established ecologies or new actors, through the establishment of new ligation. For instance, in the Briançonnais region in Southern France and in Ventimiglia in Northern Italy, existing solidarity networks have reorganized to cater to the needs of migrant populations (Giliberti 2024). Meanwhile, the government and law enforcement agencies on the French side have addressed these new publics by developing “unconventional” administrative and law enforcement interventions, often in a blurry relationship with French, European, and international laws, as seen also, among other places, in the border zone in Calais (Aradau and Tazzioli 2020; Trucco, Lamarche, and Philippe 2023).

Within a given ecology, social processes are heavily organized by competition to gain or retain control over such locations. Professions thus vie to preempt specific tasks, and emergent locations reconfigure existing professions, as the latter attempt to capture or relinquish them, or may even lead to the emergence of new professions altogether. The development of the internet, for example, has not only created new professions, such as digital data scientists, but has also reorganized numerous professional worlds by altering specific tasks, and displaced established tasks within existing professions. Likewise, the development of digital tools and infrastructures has considerably reshaped migration regulation, trajectories, and experiences (Chouraki and Georgiou 2022; Leurs 2023).

In addition to these internal dynamics, it is also important to stress that ecologies are not self-contained social formations; their borders are blurry and evolving, as adjacent ecologies constantly intersect, overlap, and interpenetrate. Hence, the notion of “linked ecologies” emphasizes the dynamics of co-configuration occurring between bordering ecologies, particularly when actors in distinct ecologies compete for the same locations. This is evident in Indonesia, where NGOs have struggled to intervene in the recruitment and placement systems, contending with reluctant public agencies and stakeholders in the smuggling business. Smugglers attempt to exclude NGOs, while NGOs work to displace smugglers. Abbott refers to such shared or contested locations as “hinges,” which contribute to linking distinct ecologies and (re)draw their evolving boundaries.

The interactions between adjacent ecologies primarily occur in two ways:

First, locations sited within one ecology can attract actors from other ecologies. For example, issuing civil status documents—a legal privilege of public agencies—has garnered the interest of actors within the migration smuggling ecology in many places. On migration routes to Europe, this interest has grown since the 1980s as visa policies in destination countries were put in place and enforced, and as border enforcement practices have extended outward to third countries and inward within national territories since the late 1990s. In many regions, this activity has been co-opted and incorporated as a significant feature within smuggling infrastructures. This capture has sometimes occurred through the manufacturing of forged documents by criminal networks, or by co-opting civil servants to secure genuine papers containing falsified information (see: Bastide 2015 on Indonesia), thus generating collaboration networks that cut across ecologies.

Second, some available or newly emerging “objects” have yet to be formally claimed by any specific ecology. Abbott refers to these open sites as “arenas.” In this perspective, it is notable that the integration of new places into migration routes leads to the emergence of new activities, locally, influenced by the emergent presence of migrants, which affect existing social, cultural, political, and economic relations, and production/reproduction processes. For instance, landowners might repurpose part of their real estate to accommodate migrants’ housing needs, or nomadic communities, such as the Tuaregs and Tebus in norther Niger (Molenaar 2017) might use their extensive knowledge of local terrains to assist migrants in continuing their journey, either in solidarity or for a fee. While such endeavors can leverage personal resources, some individuals or groups may also use their position within an existing ecology by tapping on resources to capture some of these activities. For example, civil servants may use their professional attributes to impede or facilitate mobility or to (re)allocate migrants between legal and irregularized pathways and circuits. In doing so, they compete or cooperate with other actors in the migration industry, creating alternative means to monetize their position and generate new sources of income or power and prestige (e.g. Andersson 2014; Ambrosini 2017; Lin et al. 2017; Izcara Palacios 2019).

Extending control over arenas or locations may fuel competition within and across existing ecologies, and even lead to internal or external conflicts. Such dynamics may result in various outcomes, including internal tensions or the splitting of existing ecologies. In France and Italy, for instance, while Pope Francis has made the issue of migrants central to his pontificate and clearly positioned the Catholic Church in support of migrants, many faithful oppose this stance. Local ecclesiastical communities in various places are torn between advocates of compassion, assistance, and hospitality, and more conservative segments, sometimes close to the far right, that carry a xenophobic approach towards transnational migrations.

New locations might also function as hinges between existing ecologies. This can lead to new forms of cooperation between actors from different ecologies, the eviction of particular actors, the merging of previously distinct ecologies into new ones, or the absorption and supplantation of existing ecologies by others. This type of process occurs, for example, when specific migration flows are preempted by public authorities into G2G labor recruitment and sending systems, such as particular sectors of Indonesian labor migrations to South Korea, where the entire process has been preempted and is controlled by public authorities (Prajanti et al. 2024). A similar process also occurred when Malaysia started to monitor and control more closely the influx of migrant workers in the 1970s, by regulating their recruitment by public and private companies, which had previously managed recruitment freely (Kaur, 2007, 2012).

More broadly, these processes of (re)shaping ecologies generate new, relational, “space-making” processes—“place-making” at the local level and the reconfiguration of migration routes—that may evolve in various directions. As migration juxtaposes hitherto unrelated ecologies, it creates new locations, arenas, and hinges, transforming both the places connected by migration routes and the routes themselves.

For instance, the intensification of migration in the transborder region between France and Italy (e.g. Aru 2021) has spurred dynamic interactions among migrants, law enforcement agencies, activists, researchers, politicians, and journalists. These interactions have transformed the transborder region and migration dynamics both within and beyond it. More broadly, such interconnections arise because migration regulation—ranging from facilitation to inhibition and involving a wide array of official and informal actors and infrastructures—not only leverages local resources but also often leads to the reinvestment of value extracted from migrants and migratory movements into improving the livelihood, social, and economic status of individuals and groups within their own local communities. This is evident in places such as Batam, Indonesia; Dirkou, Bilma, and Agadez in northern Niger (Hamani and Bontianti 2015; Mezzadra 2017; Brachet 2017). Consequently, although migration routes—understood as specific socio-spatial and temporal formations—are tendentially translocal and transnational, they are also firmly rooted in other spatialities (Lefebvre 1991; Soja 1999). Through their local moorings, each spatiality provides specific resources and imposes distinct constraints on the others, in a process of mutual configuration.

As these anchorages develop, they generate their own local dynamics which, although initially shaped by mobilities, may eventually diverge from, compete with, or conflict with the endogenous developments of migration routes. In Lesbos, the village of Skala Sykamnias became an “informal gate to Europe” with the influx of asylum seekers starting in 2015. The establishment of the Moria camp and the rise of makeshift settlements across the island thus fostered various social dynamics, such as the emergence of new economic circuits, and novel forms of solidarity or conflictuality (Papataxiarchis 2016a, 2016b). Some of these dynamics were oriented towards slowing down migration flows. Thus, as migration routes and segments rescale and incorporate places or generate new place-making processes, they are also inevitably reconfigured by pre-established or emerging social structures anchored in those localities. In France, as new migration circuits developed toward the UK, new types of regulatory interventions have set migrants in a situation of “hypermobility” (Aradau and Tazzioli 2020), prevented from settling in by security forces. On Europe’s southern borders, the increasing pressure put on mobilities has forced migrants to undertake journeys in increasingly hostile environments—through the Sahara and the Mediterranean—making them ever more dependent on local actors, who reinvest their competences and familiarity with such environments to make a living or improve their living standards through smuggling, by monetizing their skills to overcome these hurdles (Schindel 2016, 2022).

While such developments transform migration routes and places relationally, it is important to note that they can also generate the emergence of new places altogether. As particular geographic coordinates become strategic for migration by facilitating logistics or offering an easier passage through socio-geographic or geopolitical bottlenecks, it may lead to the emergence of new human settlements, such as the Calais jungle in Northern France (Mould 2017). Such place-making processes can also occur when transit spaces become spaces of protracted migration, stuckedness or installation, as control and regulation by states and private actors prevent migrants from moving on. As migrants organize their living under precarious circumstances, these places generate new infrastructures, and economic and social relations, such as in the “ghettos” (Raeymaekers 2024) that form along migration routes as a result of the political and social “inferiorization” (Moulier Boutang 1998) and “subjected inclusion” (Tollefsen, Hedberg, and Eriksson 2020) of migrants, which limits their mobility and access to rights and public resources.

These dynamic inter-linkages and transactions often occur across sedentary and mobile spatial regimes. Specific ecologies can emerge, propagate, and span these otherwise disjunctive spatialities, thereby facilitating their interconnectedness and articulation. Ultimately, these various types of reconfigurations usually occur both within and across socio-spatial and temporal regimes, as new arenas and/or new locations redistribute social processes in their respective contexts. Mobile and “sedentary” socio-spatial formations become enmeshed, as demonstrated by the French speaking literature on “bazaar economy,” which shows how migrants participate in the urban process and how specific cities, through migrants’ social, economic, cultural, and political activities, become central hubs connecting a wide range of migration routes (Tarrius and Missaoui 2000; Peraldi 1999; Le Marchand 2018; El Chab 2019). Secondary cities, in a national perspective, can thus, at the same time, emerge as first order global nodes with regard to transnational mobilities, as is the case, for instance, of Yiwu in China (Lu 2014; Roulleau-Berger 2022).

These transformations underscore a critical aspect—namely, the processes of “interessement” (Callon 1984; Akrich et al. 2002), which variably motivate actors to engage in the regulation of human mobilities, either facilitating or inhibiting them. This formulation allows for an expanded view of individual rationality and collective decision-making—central to the migration industry and migration brokerage literatures—by examining the relationships between different types of interests (economic, as well as social, cultural, political, and moral) and the various forms of involvement and practices of actors within migration routes. Recognizing that actors engage variably in migration regulation (in terms of both intensity and forms of engagement) also prompts a reevaluation of the diverse practices involved in migrant circulation, extending beyond brokerage. These practices frequently lead to the creation of new ecologies or to the articulation of new hinges between different ecologies, resulting in their splitting, merging, dislocation, or reconfiguration and rescaling into larger ecologies.

Eventually, the concepts of migration routes and linked ecologies underscore the necessity of considering an often-overlooked aspect of infrastructures: their diffractions, enmeshing and articulations between distinct spatialities and spatial scales, embedded within particular political, economic, and social spatial and temporal formations, and in translocal, often transnational, spatial regimes—and hence, between disjunctive social, political, cultural and economic spaces and temporalities. This integration can assume heterogeneous forms, as the extent of infrastructural components’ embedding in various social, spatial and temporal formations might vary significantly. Local housing, for example, is typically heavily influenced by local circumstances, whereas global information networks and digital resources, accessible through satellite devices, appear more “portable,” as they are largely disentangled from these local contexts. Importantly, the ecological approach urges us to explore how these overlapping spatialities interact, connect, merge, dislocate, diffract, and fragment.

4. Conclusion

This article advances a theoretical framework that offers both a formal representation of migration routes and an analytical approach to examining their structuring processes. Local ecologies of actors, practices, and infrastructures within specific places articulate to shape segments, each functioning as an ecology in its own right. These segments then interconnect around hinges to form migration routes. By building on Abbott’s “linked ecologies” framework, we illuminate the contingent interactions and social structuration processes that shape and sustain these routes, enabling the identification of strategic points of inquiry, such as hinges, where these ecologies intersect and reshape one another.

This framework thus opens new research avenues, suggesting fresh objects of inquiry within the field. In this article, we have only sketched a few scenarios for implementing this framework in the study of the middle-spaces of migration, which generates numerous new research questions and avenues for exploration. For instance, this approach invites us to consider whether certain migration routes or segments could evolve into ecologies in their own right, characterized by stabilized sets of locations, ligations, actors, and enduring connections with sedentary ecologies in the places they link. This may apply to cases such as G2G migration systems.

This would lead to a symmetrical question: might other routes take the form of contingent linkages between places, with no such broader structuration at play? In such configuration, individual segments and places might retain a high degree of autonomy with regard to migration routes. This would, in turn, raise the question of the actors and practices mediating between places, and the possibility for route segments to vary in shape, as they structure into more stable ecologies or remain in the form of contingent and circumstantial assemblages between sets of places, actors, practices, and infrastructures.

Crucially, this approach would further enable the exploration of the mutual structuration processes between the middle-spaces of migration and local places. These interactions give rise to new, multi-layered social, spatial and temporal orders and formations that often surpass the control capacities of individual politico-territorial entities, yet are also deeply reliant on their local moorings.

As a final note, it is worth stressing that, in this endeavor, the French-speaking literature on transnational migration,² which has been largely overlooked by the three examined bodies of literature despite its prominent analytical position regarding migrations in West and North Africa, offers a first set of empirical and theoretical elements to kickstart such studies.

Perhaps due to its primary focus on West and North Africa, where migration journeys can span vast distances, involve long periods of time and many migration stages, this literature has long employed a more detailed ethnographic approach to the time-spaces of mobility itself, between places of origin and destination. It has placed greater emphasis on theorizing space and temporalities, resulting in thick descriptions not only of places of origin, transit, and/or destination but also of translocal and transnational spaces, captured from the perspective of mobility. Notions such as “multipolar transnational spaces,” “interpolarity” (Ma Mung 2000), “transnational spaces in tension” (Simon 2008), “intermediate spaces” (Roulleau-Berger 2005), “multi-sited inequalities” (Roulleau-Berger 2022), “spatial trials” (Lussault and Stock 2010), and “poly-topic dwelling” (Stock 2006; Bastide 2015) can help investigate contemporary migration routes. By re-embedding the migration industries, migration infrastructures, and brokerage in broader spatial and temporal structures, these frameworks may contribute to a better understanding of the middle-spaces of migration.

Conflict of interest statement

None declared.

Funding

This work was supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 2 [MOE-T2EP402A20-0004].

Notes

References