In private hands? the markets of migration control and the politics of outsourcing

Over the past two decades a growing number of non-state actors have became involved in the management of migration control. This pattern, which has been referred to as the privatisation of migration control, has revealed new constellations of public-private links in this area of migration policy. The objective of this article is to analyse the practices and processes involved with outsourcing migration control. To do so, we propose a conceptual framework that we have denominated ‘migration markets’ and its derivative, the ‘migration control market’, as the basis for the functional classification and analysis of these processes and the actors who participate in them. This analytical framework is useful because it allows for the characterisation of various national cases and can be applied to comparative studies. In the second part of the article we apply this conceptual framework to analyse the current profile of migration control outsourcing in Spain.