Merchants of Migrant Domestic Labour - Recruitment Agencies and Neoliberal Migration Governance in Southeast Asia

This open access book discusses the market logic of recruitment agencies who deploy migrant domestic workers in Southeast Asia. Agencies are involved in all stages of worker migration trajectory from their selection, to their training, and their management at the destination. The book describes how and why these private actors play such an outsized role in this kind of worker mobility, and examines their relations with employers, workers and state apparatuses. It focuses on agents operating in the largest migrant sending countries (the Philippines and Indonesia) and receiving countries (Malaysia and Singapore) in Southeast Asia. These pioneering migration industries in the region have established practices and norms that have and continue to diffuse to other world regions. This book is of interest to policymakers, practitioners, students and researchers in migration studies, global governance, gender and migration, globalization and development, Southeast Asian studies, and area studies in political science.

List of contents

1. Introduction: Trade in Workers Who Make All Other Work Possible.- 2. Neoliberal Migration Governance: A Theoretical Framework.- 3. Labour Supply and Demands of the Market in Domestic Work.- 4. Training, Packaging and Commodification.- 5. Quality Control, Mediation and Management.- 6. Conclusion.

About the author

Liberty Chee is a MarieSklodowska-Curie Fellow at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy.  Her research examines migrant domestic work through the interdisciplinary lenses of feminist political economy, migration studies and international relations theory.  She has been working within the ambit of global migration governance, notably the role of intermediaries (the ‘migration industry’) in shaping globalizing markets in domestic work. She is interested in IR theory, interpretive research methods, and feminist epistemology.

Product details

• Authors: Liberty L Chee, Liberty L. Chee
• Publisher: Springer, Berlin
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 04.10.2025
• EAN: 9783032033529
• ISBN: 978-3-0-3203352-9
• No. of pages: 146
• Illustrations: VIII, 146 p. 13 illus.
• Series: IMISCOE Research Series
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Social structure research; Soziologie, Öffentliche Verwaltung, Arbeits- / Einkommensökonomie, Bevölkerung und Migrationsgeographie, Open Access, auseinandersetzen, Migration Policy, Labor Economics, Sociology of Migration, Human Migration, market governance, feminist political economy, Global Migration Governance, Critical political economy, Recruitment agencies, Labour brokerage, Migration industry, Power in global governance, Migration infrastructure, Migration in Southeast Asia, Domestic worker migration, Migrant domestic work in Southeast Asia, Private employment agencies, Neoliberal migration governance