ABSTRACT
Migration policy is not a stronghold of global governance. Although states all over the world are increasingly recognizing the pressure for cooperative approaches to the management of migration flows, attempts to promote such approaches at the global level have received only lukewarm support at best. The absence of an international regime regulating states’ responses to economic migration has thus been often mentioned and sometimes deplored (e.g. Ghosh 2000; Helton 2003; Hollifield 1998; Trachtman 2009). In contrast to the flow of goods and finance, where states have established strong international institutions to coordinate their market-based policies, no parallel development has taken place with regard to the international mobility of persons. With the exception of the international regimes for labour rights and refugees, which have their origins in the inter-war period, and the more recent multilateral framework for liberalizing the temporary movement of a narrowly defined segment of migrant workers in the World Trade Organization/General Agreement on Trade in Services (WTO/GATS), states have been very reluctant to regulate and liberalize international migration through multilaterally binding norms. Despite a proliferation of global initiatives on international migration governance especially in the first years of the new millennium, the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM), in its Final Report formulating the recommendations for future international action, came to the sober conclusion that:
The very nature of transnational migration demands international cooperation and shared responsibility. Yet the reality is that most states have been unwilling to commit fully to the principle of international cooperation in the area of international migration, because migration policy is still mainly formulated at the national level.
(GCIM 2005: 67)