A chain of intermediaries connects Nepali migrants to their workplace abroad, and despite the growing institutionalisation and regulation of migration, migrants tend to pay a multitude of the legal maximum [charges] for this mediation. Looking at the intermediary chain between the EU and Nepal, and the ways in which migration opportunities are produced and sold, shows that the opportunity for the prospective migrant is a commodity on an international market in which players drive up the price in their negotiation of opportunities and risk. Brokers draw on their personal networks to both recruit workers from village level, and to lower the risk of getting caught by the police. The same network permits them to find trustful business relations abroad. The intermediary chain also draws attention to the multiple processes of translation and conversion involved. Rather than being purely economic and based on global income-differentials alone, these transactions include the business and life plans of three very different groups of actors. The migration intermediaries’ business model depends on forging these different interests into one transaction. Ultimately, the opportunity for a company to save money by importing cheap labour is an opportunity for the intermediaries to sell the position as an opportunity to the potential migrant. This adaptability and malleability of the opportunity, the ability of one actor’s opportunity to fit with another one’s, and its ability to bind together the actors with very different interests and in very different parts of the world, I argue, is the very backbone of international recruitment chains.