With the expansion of international economic relations in the years following World
War II, countries around the world have become more dependent on each other while
the state’s prevalent military/security functions were replaced with those of trade, thus
giving rise to the concept of “trading state”. Migration and trade are two sides of
the coin: Rise of the trading state has triggered the establishment of the migration
state, where relationships based on power and self-interest are led equally by migration
(mobility of people) alongside trade and finance. While commercial and financial trends
are regulated by international finance and trade organizations, cross-border activities
of individuals require a different regulatory regime based on civil and human rights
(Hollifield 2004:888, 892). Despite the cross-border nature of international migration
that binds together migration policies of multiple states, there is no multilateral, official
framework that regulates their response to it. International migration encompasses
a number of different issues such as labour migration, workers’ income abroad,
international irregular migration, transit migration, life style migration, environmental
migration, human smuggling and trafficking, forced migration, forced humanitarian
migration, protection of refugees and asylum seekers. Each of these migration issues
is factually shaped through the articulation of local/national/regional and global levels.
They are also interrelated with each other. Despite this holism, a separate international
collaboration among organizations may exist for each issue. Still, such collaboration
among organizations regarding migration is quite limited compared to other crossborder
issues (Betts 2011). In today’s world, it may seem like individual states exercise
a considerable level of independency when determining their migration policies, due to
the non-existence of “United Nations Migration Organization” and an international
migration regime, it is difficult to say they hold the same level of independency when
it comes to enforcing nationally developed migration policies. Hence, states are
striving towards developing applicable migration policies by adapting a more selective
approach, through establishment of bilateral regional and inter-regional collaboration
and organizations of ever increasing complexity. On the other hand, multilateral
organizations regulating issues like commerce, health and human rights along with the
existence of global governance processes have an impact on the states’ migration policies.
All this makes migration management itself a segmented, complex and internally stressed
(due to the effect of different global governance processes) process.