Migration industries around the nexus of mobility, immobility and settlement. An overview

This introduction aims to give a brief overview of research on the migra-tion industries, based on our definition of the migration industry as all those eco-nomic and financial activities developing between people on the move and the bor-der, we categorise the literature that focuses on this topic around the nexus of mo-bility, immobility and settlement. We suggest reading and interpreting the researchalong three main dimensions, depending on where migration industry actors inter-vene in the relationship between people on the move and the border: a migrationindustry that facilitates mobility and border crossing and involves actors rangingfrom smuggling networks to global recruitment agencies; an immobility migrationindustry that involves state and private actors aiming to regulate and/or control themovement of people; and a migration industry that is not concerned with the journeyitself, but with the settlement of migrants. Various migration industry actors are pre-sent in all these stages, reconfiguring their roles, shifting their activities, and re-sponding to new and distinct opportunities for/of the commodification and commer-cialisation of migration. For these reasons, as will be argued in the introduction tothis monograph issue, the notion of industries rather than a single industry betterreflects the variety of actors and activities operating between migrant agency andborder along the different stages of migration projects.