Andrew Nova Le, The Way of Migrant Brokers: Power, Competition, and the Misconversion Capital, Social Problems, 2025;, spaf031, https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spaf031

Social scientists have recently written much concerning the role of migrant brokers in both facilitating and impeding international migration. A crucial missing piece in the literature is a discussion of the operational logic behind the brokers’ behaviors. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic observations and 224 interviews with state officials, brokers, and contract labor migrants across Vietnam, this article examines the micro-processes of migrant brokers’ behavioral response to the structural conditions they experience, and how their various behaviors adversely affect migrants. This paper analyzes how the unequal power relations between the state, brokers, and migrants lead to a competitive brokerage ecology comprising three structural conditions: brokers competing against one another in obtaining, fulfilling, and sustaining workorders from labor export companies. These structural conditions shape distinct forms of capital misconversion, which includes bundling money, delaying time, and distorting skills. This paper contributes to international migration, brokerage, and organization studies scholarship.