Migration and the SDGs

International migration has been subject to rising attention by policymakers at the global as well as national level, thus, amounting to ‘global migration governance’. The flurry of multi-lateral actions and regional activities have revolved around two interlinked concerns: 1. Management of migration, and 2. The migration-development nexus. Migrant rights issues have not been absent from these debates but are generally sidelined or appear in the context of extreme forms of human rights violations such as trafficking. The SDGs, by contrast, not only for the first time incorporate migration explicitly into global development policy, but they also have the potential to address the key factors that underline migration from a rights perspective if – as argued here - their realisation goes beyond the provision of ‘safe and orderly migration’ pathways to also address the lack of ‘decent work’ and participatory decision making from a (gendered) workers’ rights perspective at all stages of migration.