The Paucity Of International Protections: Global Migration Governance in the Contemporary Era

Abstract

The United Nations New York Declaration of September 2016 was celebrated by many as the beginning of new, multilateral negotiations on a Global Compact for Refugees and a Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.  Other observers, however, were more skeptical.  Would these negotiations initiate a new migration regime or go the way of numerous prior agreements that most states ignore?  We present a comprehensive framework that makes sense of the international landscape of migration cooperation.  We look to the patterns of migration to explain the dominance of bilateral agreements.  We adopt a bargaining framework to model the prospects for cooperation, with attention to the status quo ante, the preferences and power of states of origin and destination, and exogenous shocks to the system.  We provide empirical evidence consistent with our theoretical claims across five issue areas:  internal immigration control, labor recruitment, freedom of movement, trafficking and smuggling, and migrant rights.
 

Jeannette Money
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, UC Davis

Jeannette Money received her degree in Political Science from University of California, Los Angeles in 1991.

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