Migration and Development Policy: What Have We Learned?

Migration and development have recently emerged as a pressing policy priority on the global agenda. This report identifies critical lessons from the past decade of policy experimentation and offers some recommendations for migration and development policy. In the past, development was typically viewed as an antidote to levels of migration that were perceived as excessive or unauthorized, but international migration is now more widely recognized as an aspect of globalization that persists even at very high levels of development.

This decade has demonstrated that stronger and more positive impacts of migrants and migration on development will take time to evolve, and that policymakers will have to be flexible in their actions and expectations. No blueprint for action will produce an outcome that precisely resembles the original plan.

To make policy discussions more effective, a much deeper analysis of the lessons about what makes a practice useful needs to be undertaken, tracing how practices came to be as they are, what forces and interests shape them, how they adapted to specific contexts, and who they reached and with what effect.