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.

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.