AI Agents Do Not Need Visas: Jurisdictional Asymmetry and Agentic Labour in the Global South

Cross-border labour performed by people is among the most heavily governed activities in the world economy: visas, work permits, credential recognition, character and financial tests, quotas and resident labour-market tests. Cross-border labour performed by AI agents is governed by almost none of it. This is not a gap in AI regulation but a gap between regimes. Instruments governing AI treat it as a product; instruments governing labour mobility key on natural persons physically present in a territory. Agentic labour satisfies neither trigger, and is absorbed by default into trade law as cross-border supply of a service, even where it substitutes for the movement of a worker. We show why four regimes: immigration, trade, AI-specific regulation, and tax and labour law each fail to reach it, and argue that the incidence falls hardest on Global South economies that adopted remote services export as a development strategy. That incidence turns on sectoral concentration rather than aggregate national exposure, which is why exposure indices reporting higher aggregate exposure in richer economies do not speak against it. We advance five positions, the most immediate being that no jurisdiction currently counts agentic labour entering it. We do not argue that agentic labour should be restricted, but that its exemption from admission control is a definitional accident rather than a decision anyone has taken.