This week is Migration Week, in which the UN Network on Migration hosts multiple meetings to showcase best practices for implementation of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration. These events are a prelude to the International Migration Review Forum (IMRF) in May, which will be the most thorough check-in on the compact since it was signed more than three years ago. The May IMRF will be the first of its kind, to be replicated every four years. 

This week, then, serves as the beginning of a long period of scrutiny for the compact, which was heralded as a game-changer for cooperation on international migration. Despite its status as a nonbinding resolution, the pact was the first global agreement on migration governance, and it promises to rally divergent interests and countries in a mutually beneficial way.  

Has it been successful? The jury is still out. While international cooperation remains limited, the compact has set a groundwork upon which to build, including by creating a common language and processes for approaching issues that affect multiple countries. Migration Week and the IMRF are, if nothing else, proof that the compact is at least bringing parties to the table. 

But it is also true that there have been some major developments that the framers of the compact failed to anticipate, including that it would be controversial in some corners. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Israel, Poland, and the United States all voted against the document in 2018, and a dozen other countries abstained. My MPI colleagues recently analyzed the institutional and political crisis that the pact inspired in Europe. 

More broadly, though, it is hardly conceivable that any international framework on migration would have been able to foresee and prevent much of the unilateral policymaking and isolationist instincts that have proliferated since the onset of COVID-19. The pandemic has been in many ways unprecedented, and while it accelerated action on some migration cooperation efforts, such as around migrants’ access to health care, it hindered others. MPI’s Transatlantic Council on Migration weighed these developments a few weeks ago, concluding that “[w]hile the age of unilateralism may be waning, challenged from both the inside and outside, building a foundation for international cooperation on the world’s most pressing issues will not be automatic or without difficulty.” 

Migration Week, then, is one step on the long road of building this foundation. The mere fact of its existence may be encouraging to those who believe that international challenges are best solved by international solutions.  

Best regards,
Julian Hattem
Editor, Migration Information Source
[email protected]