Description
To manage international migration, states often contract certain roles with migration control regimes to private actors. Examples include carrier sanctions, security companies managing migrant detention, and outsourced visa application services. While research exists on what has been termed the “migration industry” that focuses on for-profit private actors in migration control, this research remains limited, focuses more on the social and economic aspects of this industry, and includes for-profit actors in informal/illegalised pathways to migration within the ambit of the migration industry. This paper argues that formalised pathways to migration can now be characterised as state-private hybrid regimes of migration control as states formally contract out certain aspects of migration control to private actors in a domain purportedly driven by the security concerns of the state, and that a new research agenda focusing on these hybrid regimes in formal pathways can present ways to study the drivers and effects of this rising privatisation in migration control. The paper outlines two logics in which privatisation is justified – expertise and efficiency and presents the case of visa application companies as an example. The paper invites IR scholars to investigate the effects of these hybrid regimes on concepts like sovereignty and security and their practice, on the everyday operations in migration control, on the individual migrant, while locating it within the disparity in access to international spaces for individuals from the global north and the global south.
