Improving the Governance of International Migration

Contemporary states are ambivalent about the global governance of migration: They desire more of it because they know they cannot reach their goals by acting alone, but they fear the necessary compromise on terms they may not be able to control and regarding an issue that is politically charged. Currently, there is no formal, coherent, multilateral institutional framework governing the global flow of migrants. While most actors agree that greater international cooperation on migration is needed, there has been no persuasive analysis of what form this would take or of what greater global cooperation would aim to achieve. The purpose of this book, the Transatlantic Council on Migration’s fifth volume, is to fill this analytical gap by focusing on a set of fundamental questions: What are the key steps to building a better, more cooperative system of governance? What are the goals that can be achieved through greater international cooperation? And, most fundamentally, who (or what) is to be governed?

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