Introduction: Cross-Border Labour Market in an Emerging Immigration Country

This chapter introduces the main theme of this work: the process of making the cross-border labour market of skilled migrants in an emerging immigration country. The chapter reviews the relevant literature on migration infrastructure and brokerage, underlining the need for in-between actors in understanding how to process the required workforce in an emerging market, especially in Japan. This immigration country continues to refrain from implementing an official migration policy. Furthermore, research on migration infrastructure in the host society catering to skilled migrants remains scarce, and this chapter presents the contribution of this study to the migration literature. This chapter introduces the market-making framework in the economic sociology literature to understand the process in which market actors interact, negotiate, and determine the rules, culture, and practices of a commodity exchange. Combining the literature on migration infrastructure and economic sociology, the chapter explains the novel contribution of this monograph by empirically exploring the activities of intermediaries that shape the market. The chapter also presents a contextual background on Vietnam’s transformation into an emerging immigrant supplier for Japan and describes the research design of this work. The chapter concludes with an outline of the structure of this monograph.