The central argument of this article is not that all, or even most, migration policies are misguided and unsuccessful. It would be equally possible – and useful – to write an article about well-conceived and successful policies. I have chosen here to focus on policy failures because of the widespread perception that “the gap between the goals of national immigration policy…and the actual results of policies in this area (policy outcome) is wide and growing wider in all major industrialized democracies” (emphasis in original) (Cornelius et al.,1994). This crisis of national migration policies is exacerbated by the relative absence of global governance with regard to international migration, which contrasts with the development of global rules and institutions in other areas of economic and political relations.