Diverging demographics are making labor mobility essential to the future of international labor markets. High-income countries are aging fast: they need an additional 400 million workers by 2050, while unfilled jobs are already costing the global economy USD 3–7 billion every day. At the same time, the world’s young workforce is increasingly concentrated in Africa and South Asia, where growth in new workers outstrips growth in jobs. In Africa, 10–12 million young people already enter the workforce each year, but only around 3 million jobs are created.
This divergence represents not only massive potential impact but also a significant business opportunity. LaMP estimates that a quality labor mobility industry could be worth USD 30 billion a year. As shortages intensify and visa pathways open and evolve, new businesses are emerging to meet the demand, unlocking transformative jobs in the process.
At LaMP, we know this industry is central to unlocking labor mobility at scale. It provides what employers, voters, and politicians all need before they will support a significant expansion of work visas: the assurance that well-prepared workers will arrive through protected and legal channels. Trainers and credentialers ensure that workers have the skills they need to hit the ground running; recruiters match the right worker to the right job and manage the process; and lawyers and tech platforms ensure compliance.
Building this industry has been core to LaMP’s mission from the start. For those of us looking to unlock mobility for social impact, the question then becomes: if the primary engine of change is commercial activity, what is the role of philanthropy and nonprofits? The answer is this: a strong business case alone won’t build this industry.
In this three-part blog series, I will lay out (1) why this industry won’t scale without support, (2) the specific ways we are investing in industry collaboration to unlock its growth, and (3) how these investments draw on the growth trajectories seen in other industries.
Structural barriers: Why good businesses still struggle
Let’s start with the first question: if we are already seeing new businesses responding as market opportunities open, why won’t this industry scale without support?
Here are the problems you can expect to run into as you start your mobility business:
Policy:
This is the most obvious barrier, and the one everyone expects – if there isn’t a legal work visa in the geography or sector you’re looking to serve, there is no market for your business. Either job placements aren’t possible, or they happen through illicit actors in unauthorized channels.
The good news is that the addressable market unconstrained by visa policy is much larger than people think. True, the US H-2B cap sets a firm upper limit on business potential, but in Germany, virtually all skilled worker and apprenticeship visas are uncapped on paper (seasonal employment and work visas with no qualification requirement are capped). In Italy, the 2023 Cutro Decree allows foreign workers who complete approved training and education programs in their home countries to enter outside the annual quotas. Japan’s Specified Skilled Worker visa has a cap of 805,000 through March 2029, with only 390,000 placements as of March 2026, leaving more than half of the quota still available.
The bad news is that the mere existence of a work visa doesn’t mean the policy environment offers a viable market for your business.
First, even where work visas exist and are available, the unwieldy regulations and bureaucracy behind them can make them unattractive to employers in practice. Even when visas are uncapped, employers may choose not to use them if lengthy and unpredictable visa processes, sponsorship costs, salary thresholds, and skilling requirements such as language proficiency and skills recognition mean that hiring a foreign worker is no longer a good return on investment.
Second, frequent policy changes can mean that you go through the entire process of setting up what would have been a successful business, only to have the policy abruptly change and your market disappear.
Take UK social care. Care workers became eligible for sponsorship under the Health and Care visa in February 2022. Just over three years later, in 2025, the government closed overseas recruitment for adult social care roles. Workers already in the UK can still extend or switch sponsors under transitional rules running until July 2028, but for businesses reliant on recruiting from abroad, the market vanished. Industry players have had to reorient their business toward an already shrinking domestic workforce or navigate the complexities of hiring from the pool of displaced overseas care workers.
Market Failures and Frictions:
High upfront costs of entry: Opening a successful migration corridor requires detailed technical knowledge of market and policy conditions and deep relationships – all of which take significant upfront investment before a business can get going. In the social sector, this has often meant that multiple organizations spend a lot of time and philanthropic or public money on the same market mapping – the same data, the same conversations, repeated whenever a new actor is looking to enter a market. For businesses without philanthropic capital, this upfront cost can keep them out of a new market altogether.
Fragmented skill recognition: As all employers know, hiring any employee is a risky endeavor, and hiring across borders even more so. Until someone is in a job, it is incredibly difficult to know if they really have the right skills – a problem that skill certifications were created to solve. But certifications rarely translate directly from one country to another. For your mobility business, this creates another barrier – if the sector you’re placing workers in requires a certification, workers will need to recertify, making your time to placement longer, training costs higher, and employers reluctant to issue job orders.
Constrained capital: Once you have worked out everything above, you may be ready to start your business – but now you need capital. In labor mobility, costs are incurred early in the process, and value is created later. This often leads to a working capital gap – especially for businesses operating in distinct seasonal or industry cycles. The dynamics described above make mobility a risky business, and the potential for political backlash is always lurking in the background for businesses and employers in the space. To date, only the most intrepid, impact-first investors are willing to take risks in mobility. In today’s capital-constrained environment, those investors are difficult to find.
Inequitable Access to Opportunity:
If you’re starting a business to make a profit, the most attractive markets will be those moving middle-income workers from established sending countries into professions with higher earning potential. Profit margins are higher, visa pathways are more established, and risks are lower – this is why we already see a robust industry around the world serving mobility for doctors, engineers, and nurses, particularly for workers in middle-income countries.
This is a good outcome for your business, but not necessarily for the world – the workers who stand to benefit the most (from poorer families in lower-income countries) are left behind, and sectors that need workers just as badly but have lower margins to cover the cost of services receive less support.
For those of us thinking about the social impact of mobility, this is where we start to consider how concessional capital can best be deployed to reduce risks and build scale for the highest-impact sectors and populations.
How can one business overcome all these barriers?
For many of them, the short answer is that it can’t – these are collective-action problems, not individual business problems. No single firm can solve them, and each firm that tries bears the cost while everyone else benefits.
This is where architecture for industry collaboration comes in – the experience of numerous other industries shows that these barriers can be overcome when businesses pool their influence and work together. In the next post, I will lay out the investments we are making in shared infrastructure for the mobility industry.
