People move. This self-evident proposition cannot, of course, capture the almost limitless nuances associated with large numbers of individuals crossing national borders. According to the United Nations, there are more than 180 million international migrants around the world, including refugees – more than the entire population of Brazil.
The international migration mosaic is complex. Displaced persons may be in flight from major infrastructure projects, such as China’s Three Gorges project to dam the Yangtze river, or from creeping desertification in sub-Saharan Africa, or from environmental degradation in places like the environs of the Aral Sea or Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union. This is to say nothing about the millions of individuals who leave their homelands because of economic distress, or who are simply seeking better lives.
How governments respond
Governments employ a wide variety of policies, many of them rather crude, to address the transnational movements of people. Indeed, how we label the movements of people says much more about the nature of governmental policy arrangements with respect to the phenomenon of international migration than about the particular motivations and characteristics of the individuals who migrate. These different labels correspond to policies which are imposed on populations who are crossing borders, almost always with highly mixed individual motivations.
