ABSTRACT
For many years international migration attracted scholarly interest from a number of cognate disciplines – economics, demography, human geography and sociology. However, since the early 1990s the subject has moved from the academy to the realm of ‘high politics’, providing a focus of concern for politicians, international agencies and strategic thinkers (Cornelius et al. 1994; Meissner 1993). A prominent account in this vein was written by a former director-general for emigration in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome, Nino Falchi (1995), who argued that international migration has the potential to cause disequilibria on a global scale. Strategic discussions on how to ‘manage’ and contain global migration flows have centred on two questions. Can prosperity induced by enhanced trade with labour-exporting countries reduce the need and desire for labour migration? And can aid targeted at the same countries and regions produce a slowdown in migration?
