The GCC-South Asia Labor Recruitment System: Comparing Nepal and Pakistan Within the scholarship on GCC migration states there continue to be significant gaps in relation to the transnational labor recruitment system that brings the vast majority of labour migrants to the region. Scholars have certainly provided evidence that the large majority of migrants to the Gulf States secure their jobs via the labour recruitment system, and that this system is fraught with challenges and places individual migrants in a precarious position. It is understood that labour agents and agencies amongst other things assist migrants with complexities of the paperwork process, arrange transportation and documentation, and that for these various services migrants end up paying large recruitment fees. Often migrants are required to secure loans informally or formally in order to pay for these services, and frequently arrive in the Gulf bearing heavy debt burdens as a result. Beyond this existing knowledge of the problematic aspects of the labour brokerage system, little is about the different actors engaged in the labour brokerage system, their explicit roles, and the particular services that they provide. This paper, based on fieldwork conducted in Nepal and Pakistan, provides an ethnographically-rich comparative portrait of Nepali and Pakistani components of the Gulf-South Asia labour brokerage system. Utilizing field notes and interviews drawn from two-week periods of fieldwork in both Nepal and Pakistan, ethnographic data is analyzed within the context of the differing policy environments that govern labor brokers in these two South Asian states, as well as the existing systems in the receiving states. Moving beyond existing studies that focus on the operation and economic role of labour recruiters, this paper provides deep insight on how different stake-holders in the Gulf-South Asia labour brokerage system view their roles, their institutions, the broader contextual environment in which they work, the role of the state and systems of governance (both in the Gulf and in the sending states), and their contribution to migrants’ success.