ABSTRACT
The notion of a ‘globalised’ world is often associated with the idea of flowsmovements of capital, data, ideas and people. Such movements are said to produce increased integration in a world which is becoming ‘a single place’. But in their enthusiasm to identify such changes theorists of globalisation invariably underemphasise or ignore efforts to control certain flows, in particular the attempts to stem or even reverse flows of people. Some Western states and transnational bodies are expending enormous energy to contain such movements, especially emigration from Africa, Asia and Latin America. By insisting that migrants from these continents remain at the margins of the world system, they seem to confirm the old binary oppositions of world affairs-those between First and Third Worlds, North and South. For global theory such divisions have been rendered meaningless: for tens of millions of migrants they are a stark reality.
