The relationship between migration and economic conditions in sending societies is a topic of heated debate among policymakers and development professionals in both sending and receiving societies. The complex relationships are collectively referred to as the migration-development nexus, a term that highlights the linkage between human movements and socioeconomic change in the Global South. The aim of reducing migration by generating development and job growth in Mexico was even more explicit in the negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA in the 1990s. While wealthy countries advocate development, paradoxically, as a means of restricting migration flows, poorer countries have increasingly looked to those very migration flows as a means of achieving economic development. Asian states have been leaders in encouraging and facilitating labor export as a development strategy, in parallel with broader export-oriented industrialization policies. Transfer of Knowledge through Expatriate Nationals, TOKTEN was also viewed as a means of circumventing problems commonly associated with traditional development assistance.