Governing Global Labor Migration: Compacts and Contradictions

Global migration governance is a patchwork of multiscalar regimes that overlap and attempt to regulate the different types of migrants who cross national borders to work. However, except for very limited restrictions, states are free to determine who enters their territory, whether they can work, what they can work on and for how long, and whether they can access public benefits available to permanent residents and citizens. A common complaint in academic and policy literature on international migration is that there is no global migration governance regime to provide policy coherence to the current fragmented situation. This is why the adoption by the United Nations in 2018 of the Global Compact for Migration was hailed as a “historic achievement.” It has been applauded for striking a balance between migrants’ rights and the principle of states’ sovereignty over their territory. The compact signifies a shift in the language around migration away from flow management to rightsbased governance, and a reframing of migration away from national security to development. This chapter probes the compact’s discursive shift by exploring how the compact frames the “problem” of global migration and its governance “solution” to it.