The study of social capital has been one of the strongest areas of recent advance in migration research, but there are still many questions about how it works and why it has varying effects in studies of different places. In this article, we address the contextual variation in social capital’s effects on migration by considering migration brokers. We argue that destinations for which migration is logistically difficult to arrange give rise to brokerage industries and hypothesize that brokers, in turn, substitute for the informational capital typically provided by social networks. Our empirical tests in Nepal support this narrative, showing that social networks matter for migration to destinations where brokers are not available and have little discernible effect on migration to brokered destinations. Our results suggest that migration research should consider the growing role of brokerage agencies, that theorizations of social capital more broadly must contend with how it is delimited by brokers, and that social scientists might also consider other consequences that can arise from these migration brokers that are increasingly common in many countries and provide a marketized replacement for social capital in some cases.

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社会资本何时对移民很重要？尼泊尔网络、经纪人和移民的研究

社会资本的研究一直是移民研究最近取得进展的最有力的领域之一，但关于它如何运作以及为什么它在不同地方的研究中产生不同的影响仍然存在许多问题。在本文中，我们通过考虑移民经纪人来解决社会资本对移民影响的背景变化。我们认为，在后勤上难以安排移民的目的地会产生经纪行业，并假设经纪人反过来替代了通常由社交网络提供的信息资本。我们在尼泊尔的实证测试支持这种说法，表明社交网络对于迁移到没有中介的目的地很重要，并且对迁移到中介目的地的影响很小。