Intermediating mobility and immobility: power, brokerage and labour migration in Romania

Labour intermediation is a key infrastructure through which both mobility and immobility are produced in contemporary migration regimes. Based on 42 semi-structured interviews with labour intermediaries and 17 observed meetings between intermediaries and Romanian based employers, this article identifies five configurations across outbound and inbound labour flows, differentiated by who recruits, who employs, which actors control information, fees and accommodation, and how state regulation conditions those relations. The article makes two contributions. First, it conceptualises configurations as relational arrangements rather than discrete intermediary types. Second, it shows empirically that intermediary involvement alone does not determine workers’ dependence, since the regulatory regime within which a configuration operates conditions the extent to which organisational position can be converted into control. Understanding intermediation as a relational field in Bourdieu’s sense, the article shifts attention from the individual broker to the interlinkage among intermediaries, employers and state regulation. Drawing on the mobility turn, it conceptualises mobility not as movement alone but as an unevenly distributed, socially produced condition.