The broker is a tax. The migrant pays it at every step.

The word 'broker' suggests a single intermediary charging a single fee. The reality for a migrant worker is a chain of them, a toll at every step of the journey from home village to factory floor, each small enough to seem tolerable and together large enough to erase a month's savings.

There is a fee to learn where the work is. A fee to be introduced to the employer. A fee, sometimes, to secure the shift. A deposit and a cut to get the room. A charge to arrange transport. None of these are the wage, they are the cost of accessing the wage, and they fall entirely on the person least able to pay them.

This is why migration so often fails to pay in the first months. The worker has borne every toll up front, before a single paycheck lands, and spends his first weeks simply recovering the cost of arriving. The system extracts most where the worker can least afford it.

Removing the broker isn't a moral gesture; it's an economic one. When a worker can find verified work directly, house himself at a fixed and honest cost, and keep his full wage, the tolls disappear and savings begin immediately instead of months later.

Continuity infrastructure exists, in part, to abolish this hidden tax. Replace the chain of intermediaries with one accountable system, and the money that used to leak into tolls stays with the person who earned it, which is, after all, the whole point of leaving home.