Page 262 PoLAR: Vol. 40, No. 2 Maybritt Jill Alpes VU Amsterdam Papers That Work: Migration Brokers, State/Market Boundaries, and the Place of Law State discourses on smuggling and trafficking are regulatory technologies that seek to institute moral hierarchies between institutions by villanizing third-party mediators as dangerous criminals. This article instead studies high-risk migration and illegality through the actions of migration brokers and from the perspective of aspiring migrants in a place of departure. Seeking to overcome the legal/illegal divide by focusing on interactions at socially constructed state/market boundaries, the article asks two questions: What is the role of legality for aspiring migrants? And what role do states play in the emergence of migration brokers? Based on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Anglophone Cameroon, between 2007 and 2013, and a case study of two migration brokers, the article demonstrates, first, that aspiring migrants evaluate migration brokers and travel documents in terms of their powers and efficiency, and, second, how migration brokers enact state-like forms and activities. [travel documents, illegality, smuggling, brokers, Cameroon] A young man in Buea, Cameroon received an admission letter for a degree in accountancy in Malaysia, but considered he needed the help of a broker to transfer the tuition fee to the university, as well as to get the visa for Malaysia. He thus applied to a migration broker, Mr. Walter, 1 who informed him of his fees. Mr. Walter scheduled the departure day, but then for several weeks he neither received news from the young man nor provided him with any. On the day of the scheduled departure, the young man called him to say the money needed to pay for Mr. Walters’s services was finally ready. At this point, Mr. Walter had not made plans for an airline ticket, visa, or hotel reservation. Mr. Walter rushed to Douala, which is the economic capital of Cameroon. He picked me up on his way there. As we drove, Mr. Walter called a contact. He intended to have the young man first travel to Laos, which is “visa free,” and from there he would travel to his final destination in Malaysia. The contact was instructed to arrange a hotel reservation in the Laotian capital of Vientiane. I was given to understand that Mr. Walter would “pay the route” at Douala Airport. As he said, police officers are “hungry,” indicating that one never knew what to expect about necessary payoffs. His connections, as well as his knowledge, made Mr. Walter confident in his powers. When we picked up the aspiring migrant and his mother at the roadside at the assigned time of 4 p.m., the young man greeted us anxiously and asked, “Am I still leaving tonight?” The flight was scheduled to leave at 11 p.m., and Mr. Walter was confident, saying, “The boy will go out.” Speed proves the true power of a broker, while delays and slow travel projects evoke fears of failure in aspiring migrants. As we drove off, Mr. Walter asked the young man to type his name into his mobile phone. I took the initiative to ask him to type his name exactly as it was written in his passport. Mr. Walter then texted the aspiring migrant’s name to his contact, who was to arrange PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 40, Number 2, pp. 262–277. ISSN 1081-6976, electronic ISSN 1555-2934. C  2017 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/plar.12219.