The purpose of this paper is to analyse the ambivalence of public private partnerships in Migration policy making and to re-assess the role of the sponsorship system in the management of migrants and their families. We analyze the relationship between the state and private actors (firms, recruitment agencies, chambers of commerce, various brokers and sponsors) which was constructed partly through a joint management of labour migration fluxes. From the 1960s to the 1990s, migration management was negotiated between state administrations, firms and recruitment agencies, overlooked by Chambers of commerce. Early “migration policy” were first managed by the US-owned ARAMCO and the Saudi state, linking private, national and foreign interests. After the nationalization of the ARAMCO, the public /private partnership remained the key scheme of migration management in a shifting institutional environment. The sponsorship system known as kafâla embodied the importance of private actors in migration management: the State externalises the control over foreign workers to their employer or their recruiter and immigrants are tied to Saudi counterparts who are their legal sponsors (kâfil, plur: kufala’). Far from being a public instrument of control over immigration trends and immigrants’ residence, the sponsorship system can be seen as a system of brokerage that institutionalized a delegation of State prerogatives to civil society. In the early 1990, “Saudisation policies” led to “bring the state back” in migration management. They were designed to promote the indigenization of the labour force and lower the share of immigrant labour in the economy. Symbolically enough, the Ministry tried to put the kafâla system under tighter control: local and national administration broke down on immigration brokers particularly in the service and small business sector, where the kâfil could shun the restriction immigration and bypass legal processes of migration management implemented in large-scale labour import. The private sector resisted saudisation policies which failed to meet their objectives. Saudisation nevertheless revealed the tension between the state and private institutions in immigration processes and procedures. State control over the foreign labour force is often presented as a means to enforce labour law and the rights of foreign workers, as private or even informal processes allow exploitation and abuses. But the efficiency of migration policies is limited by the interest of private actors and private interests within the state apparel benefiting from the “rent” that migration represents.