ABSTRACT
This chapter brings to light how migrant assistance and migrant brokerage are part of the same configuration. The chapter provides ethnographic accounts of labour migration brokers who become safe migration outreach workers for NGOs, former NGO staff who turn to labour recruitment agencies for employment, as well as other informants who simultaneously fuse the two roles as brokers and helpers. The chapter explicates the role of brokers and brokering practices within safe Migration Aid delivery and considers the analytical challenges this poses for how we both understand aid delivery in relation to brokers, but also how moral opposites – assistance and exploitation – are brought together. This, in turn, relates to how aid actors enable an operational space of assistance. Hence, beyond pointing to how assistance and brokering fuse, the chapter divulges how counter-intentional effects of program interventions are produced through different modes of visibility and indiscernibility which allows dichotomous practices to become one.
