Arrival Brokers and Commercial Infrastructuring for and With Migrant Newcomers in Dortmund, Germany

Current research underlines the important role of arrival infrastructures in urban spaces in enabling and shaping migrants’ arrival. These include arrival brokers, individuals who help newcomers access resources. As yet, we have little knowledge on brokers’ informal and commercial practices in the context of arrival, especially in European cities, whereby brokers unsettle common “distinctions between ‘state’ and ‘market,’ as well as ‘formal’ and ‘informal’” (Lindquist, 2012, p. 75). This article aims to contribute to our understanding of arrival brokers by shedding light on commercial brokering in an arrival area in Dortmund, Germany, looking at the relations between brokers and newcomer clients. The study is based on ethnographic research, including one year of participant observation in a broker’s shop, and interviews with both brokers and newcomers. Covering both perspectives, this article analyses how commercial arrival brokering shapes newcomers’ access to resources. The findings offer new insights into arrival brokers’ multiple facets of in/formal and commercial infrastructuring. The article shows how brokers’ accessibility depends on spatial, social, financial, and temporal factors. It is relational both within the local context of service provision and through setting the conditions governing resource access. Arrival brokers can influence newcomers’ arrival processes by enabling, channelling (and sometimes blocking) resource access while also offering opportunities for newcomers to circumvent and compensate for other—more formal—forms of support. Commercial brokering evolves as a practice between brokers and newcomers within, parallel to, and beyond the support provided by more formal institutions.