Governments and NGOs worldwide have blamed migration agents for abusing migrant rights and causing policy failures, and have tried hard to regulate or eradicate them. Based on four years’ fieldwork on labor migration from China to Japan, South Korea and Singapore, this presentation demonstrates that the origin of the multiple agents lies in nowhere but the states themselves. Almost directly mirroring the setup of the state bureaucracy, recruitment agents in China exist at almost all the administrative levels; they coordinate with each other and constitute “agent chains.” They are thus the state in the mirror. Structured in such a multiscalar fashion, agents at once deal with the bureaucracy efficiently to get the business done, render transnational mobility governable for the states, and reinforce the hierarchically territorialized administrative system in order to secure their own gatekeeper positions. This mode of transnational governance is based on particular relations between the states, capital and labor. This presentation also explores how ethnographic research can tackle such “big” issues in the era of globalization.