Linking Migration, Social Development and Policy in the South — An Introduction

In an increasingly globalized and interconnected world, migration has emerged as one of the central policy challenges of the future. In 2007, 200 million international migrants existed worldwide, sending around US$337 billion1 in remittances across the globe, with $251 billion of this going to developing countries (IOM 2008a; Ratha et al. 2008). Not surprisingly, international migration and the debate on the causes and consequences of migration for developing countries have gained a great deal of visibility within the policy-making world2 and regained much attention within academia as well (Castles and Wise 2008; Adepoju et al. 2007). This new interest and concern at the global level is reflected in the set-up of the Global Commission on International Migration between 2003 ©and 2005, the subsequent United Nations (UN) High Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development in 2006 and the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) that was launched in Brussels in 2007 and is now held annually. The latest addition to these activities, which further highlights the growing importance of migration on the global policy-making agenda, is the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human DevelopmentReport, entitled Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development (UNDP 2009).