Project Description
The number of international regimes has increased greatly over the past few decades in many areas but international cooperation among states to regulate international migration has been very limited; there is no international migration regime. If we think about international migration as a subset of all movements of people across international borders, the possibilities for cooperation among states expand. In contrast to the UN definition of migrants as those who live outside of their state of nationality or birth for more than one year, “global mobility” refers to movements of people across international borders for any length of time or purpose. In addition to the world’s estimated 191 million migrants, there are billions of border crossings by tourists, business people and students who travel internationally for stays of less than a year. This project examines a set of interacting global mobility regimes: the established international refugee regime; an emerging international travel regime and a non-existent but potential international labor migration regime (see descriptive table). Although the issue areas of these three regimes overlap somewhat and this overlap can lead to misunderstandings and policymaking at cross purposes, potential issue linkages can also be leveraged for widening the scope of international cooperation, perhaps even to form an international labor migration regime.
The project will produce an edited volume based on contributions from an interdisciplinary group of international relations and international migration scholars who gave informal presentations of draft papers at a small closed November 2008 workshop in Washington, DC and then will give formal presentations at a larger April 2009 conference in New York City.
This policy-oriented research project is led by Rey Koslowski and supported by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation