Introduction

Abstract

‘International migration has risen to the top of the global policy agenda’ This is the first sentence of the report by the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM, 2005: vii). It also serves, in slightly different versions, as an introductory sentence to countless publications of both research and policy nature — and could also serve as the inaugural sentence of this book. Such a statement has today become so common that one almost feels embarrassed to formulate it once again. It is not that this sentence is wrong, but rather that it corresponds to one of these common sense claims that pervade much of one can read on international migration and makes this scholarship, at times, somewhat repetitive.