ABSTRACT
Migrants connect. They make borders threadbare. They operate in or even establish spaces in geographical, social, political, economic and cultural respects. If migrants cross international borders, they create transnational spaces and their activities trigger responses from and impact on the policies of institutions of governance of sovereign states, supranational and international institutions and as well as civil society groups. Yet the formulation and implementation of migration policies has most commonly been vested in the decision-making institutions of sovereign states for two-hundred or so years. This has been so although transnational migration, by its very nature, is a border-crossing process and cannot, therefore, be dealt with unilaterally within the confines of only one state. In fact, some of the transnational spaces within which migrants have operated or which they established have existed for a long time, joining together several states or other types of polities. But regional institutions or transnational regimes have rarely been involved in the formulation and implementation of migration policies. Currently, most regional integration and cooperation schemes are only gradually including migration into their agendas or, in the case of the European Union (EU), develop their migration policies along the traditional, regressive lines of national states. There are only three international organizations and institutions dealing with migration, namely the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR), the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). There appears to be a clash of perceptions between migrants on the one side and, on the other, law-makers, political decision-makers and administrators in charge of and theorists reflecting on migration. Whereas the latter have looked at migration from the point of view of government, many transnational migrants have been agents of regionalism, if not of globalization, not necessarily by intention but through manifest action.
