Internal Fragmentation and Cooperation: Trends in Transnational Migration Governance

The presentation examines internal fragmentation and cooperation in transnational migration governance, focusing on current trends. In particular, it discusses legal frameworks for the protection of humanitarian migrants, regional migration agreements, and the involvement of civil society actors in migration policymaking. This will be followed by an assessment of the global compacts on migration currently being developed by the UN, asking if, and if so how, this can be regarded as a significant step toward cooperation in global governance. A common global governance framework does not (yet) exist for international migration. The governance of international migration remains fragmented with regional and bilateral agreements, mostly regarding low-skilled and humanitarian migration. This lack of coordination can be attributed to the concerns of nation states about sovereign control of their national borders, the political volatility of the issue, and lack of consensus among national governments on migration-related matters. The protection of migrants and refugees fall under different UN conventions and agencies. The rights of refugees are protected under the widely ratified 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol. The UN also created the International Convention on the Protection of the rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families. The Global Migration Group has developed rights-based policies for migrants, and human trafficking falls under the Convention against Transnational Organized crime. These examples illustrate the fragmentation of legal frameworks that govern the mobility and rights of migrants and refugees. International migration is also governed at the regional scale, including the European Union, NAFTA, ASEAN, and MERCOSUR. Within the EU, a Europeanization of asylum and migration policies is evident in the Dublin Convention, joint European border management (Frontex), the Returns Directive for undocumented migrants, and the EU Blue Card Directive for skilled migrants. These examples showcase a transfer of competencies to EU institutions, but nation states still exert their influence in the EU Council, intergovernmental working groups, and to a lesser extent the European Council. In the absence of a unified migration governance framework, local governments, civil society actors and private actors have gained influence in agenda-setting and governance of migration-related issues. In addition, nation states have ‘shifted up’ some of their responsibilities for migrants and refugees to the European Union and international organizations, ‘out’ towards civil society organizations and private actors, and ‘down’ toward local authorities. These rescaling processes have created a complex institutional architecture. Calls for a global governance framework for migrants and refugees regained momentum during the 2015 humanitarian crisis. In response, the UN hosted its first-ever high-level summit on migration and refugees on 19 September 2016. At this meeting the UN General Assembly adopted the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, which marked the launch of a three-phase process to develop a global compact on refugees, and another one on safe, orderly and regular migration. The global compacts may signal a significant step toward global governance of migration, but it remains to be seen what the compacts will entail.