This paper examines the policy regimes that regulate Ethiopian women’s migration as domestic workers to Kuwait and Lebanon, focusing on the role of the facilitators of this movement. The paper draws on multi-sited empirical research in Ethiopia, Lebanon and Kuwait, and analyses how national and international policies produce two oppositional categories of illegal brokers or traffickers on the one hand and employment agents on the other hand. The paper discusses how despite the policy distinction between these two categories, there are blurred boundaries between them in their recruitment operations, as they often collaborate and manoeuvre around laws and regulations. This paper argues that the persistence of illegal brokers and traffickers notwithstanding the efforts to regulate their operations does not simply indicate the need for more or better regulation (as is often suggested). Rather, it calls for recognition of how the policies – and importantly, the non-policies – frame both the legal and illegal trade in migrant workers as a highly lucrative entrepreneurial activity. A comparative analysis of policy approaches to regulating the trade in migrants in Lebanon and Kuwait reflects divergent underlying views of the role of migrant domestic workers in the national economy.