The regularisation industry: a qualitative analysis of the legal-administrative intermediation field

The bureaucratic management of the legal and administrative statuses of migrants is a pervasive yet scarcely researched aspect of the migratory experience. This article describes the field of intermediation services for migrants, with a particular focus on legal and bureaucratic support. Using the 2020 regularization of irregular migrant workers in Italy as a case study, it shows that actors related to this emerging segment of the ‘migration industry’ are not only concerned with facilitating migrants’ physical border crossings but also that intermediation services increasingly involve the crossing of internal borders, particularly between different (il)legal migration statuses. The article describes the field of legal-administrative status-intermediation, highlighting the different actors involved, who differ widely in their legal competency and the degree to which they marketize their services. The article argues that the combination of legal uncertainty and the specific features of the institutional and regulatory framework concerning intermediation services in Italy creates space for the emergence and expansion of for-profit actors. These actors operate on a sliding scale between legal and illegal, formal and informal service-provision, ranging from commercial intermediation to illicit practices and fraud. Additionally, the article shows increasing forms of competition and tension between non-profit and for-profit actors in the field. The analysis is based on 45 interviews with different actors of civil society, employers and migrants involved in the amnesty. The article looks at the migration industry as a field of intermediation in a context marked by the pandemic and on the forms of embeddedness of irregular migrants in local society.