This chapter examines the law and politics of migration and refugees in global governance. Most governments are committed to an international refugee regime that requires them to welcome and support refugees, but also many governments wish to prevent refugees and other migrants from crossing borders into their countries. This contradiction provides fuel for legal and political disputes, with migrants bearing the human costs. The dynamics illustrate ways in which legal obligations and politics preferences weave around and through each other, sometimes in conflict, sometimes together, in surprising combinations.

The conclusion of a relationship agreement between the IOM and the UN in 2016, alongside the organisation’s rebranding to ‘UN Migration’, gave the appearance of a significant shift in a normative direction, but was it? And what are the implications for people displaced by climate change? The IOM has never been a UN agency. In fact, characteristic features of the IOM that set it apart from the UN are preserved in the 2016 Agreement, including the express retention and acknowledgement of its institutional independence. Moreover, the UN and the IOM are oriented to achieve quite different goals. Whereas the mandate of the UN is normative and protective, fundamentally concerned with upholding human rights, the constitutional mandate of the IOM is ‘to make arrangements for the organized transfer of migrants’ and to provide various migration services ‘at the request of and in agreement with the States concerned’. Accordingly, the IOM’s adoption of the UN name and logo could be misleading.

The United Nations (UN) charter did not include voluntary contributions because some feared it would undermine multilateralism. Since the 1990s, UN agencies have increasingly been financed through earmarked contributions from a diverse set of donors. A growing body of literature examines the relationship between funding and global governance. This chapter examines the role that money has played in the origin and evolution of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) as a case study of earmarking in the wider UN system. The chapter uses a new dataset of earmarked contributions to IOM to examine thematic and temporal patterns in the contributions of main donors. Contributions have largely focused on issues relating to migration management that reflect the specific interests of donors, lending weight to the argument that the earmarking of financing has allowed bilateral interests to dominate multilateral responses. On the other hand, earmarked funding has also allowed the international community to extend protection to displaced populations not covered by the refugee convention as well as to push forward migration, often a contentious issue, at the international level.

Since the international community adopted the UN Trafficking Protocol nearly two decades ago, our approach to the problem of human trafficking has shifted significantly. With too few traffickers prosecuted and too few victims protected, there is growing recognition of the need for more robust efforts to prevent trafficking in the first instance. Trafficking is not simply the product of deviant, criminal behavior that once rooted out, can be easily eliminated. Also to blame are deeply embedded societal structures that facilitate, and even reward, exploitation – in particular, weak labor and migration frameworks that perpetuate precarity for migrant workers in their search for economic opportunities. Because worker exploitation and trafficking differ in degree, not in kind, addressing worker exploitation more broadly can help prevent the abuses from escalating into trafficking. This Chapter explores how emerging global governance over labor migration – with the recently-adopted UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration and the now-elevated role of the International Organization for Migration – could play a role in preventing human trafficking.