Consider a striking asymmetry in the architecture of global governance. The movement of goods across borders is regulated by the World Trade Organization, a dense web of binding rules, dispute settlement mechanisms, and enforcement procedures refined over seven decades. The movement of capital is overseen by the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements, and a thicket of regulatory coordination bodies. But the movement of people—arguably the most consequential flow in the global economy—has no comparable institutional infrastructure. The International Organization for Migration only joined the UN system in 2016, and the most ambitious multilateral framework to date, the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, is explicitly non-binding.

This isn't an oversight. It reflects deep structural features of the international system that make migration governance qualitatively different from trade or financial governance. The political economy of migration touches sovereignty anxieties that tariff negotiations simply do not. The actors involved—sending states, receiving states, transit states, migrants themselves—have interests that are not merely divergent but often incommensurable within existing institutional frameworks.

Understanding why migration governance remains institutionally thin requires moving beyond the familiar complaint that states lack political will. The architecture of cooperation itself is constrained by factors that institutional designers must confront honestly: the deep sovereignty sensitivity of population control, the structural dominance of bilateral arrangements, and the deliberate weakness of the instruments that do exist. Each of these deserves careful analysis.

States have progressively delegated authority over trade policy, monetary coordination, and even security cooperation to international institutions. Yet migration control remains one of the last domains where sovereignty is treated as essentially non-negotiable. This is not merely a function of nationalism or populist politics—though those forces amplify it. It reflects a deeper structural reality about what migration governance asks states to surrender.

Trade liberalization, at its core, asks governments to adjust economic policy. It redistributes costs and benefits among domestic producers and consumers, but it does not challenge the fundamental composition of the political community itself. Migration, by contrast, directly implicates who belongs—who can enter, reside, work, and eventually claim membership in the polity. This makes it qualitatively different from other governance domains. As political theorist Michael Walzer argued decades ago, the right to control membership is constitutive of political community. States treat it accordingly.

The institutional implications are profound. In trade, states accept binding dispute settlement because the costs of compliance are economic and adjustable. In migration, compliance with an adverse ruling could mean accepting populations that domestic politics categorically rejects. No major receiving state has shown willingness to submit migration decisions to binding third-party adjudication. The political risks are perceived as existential in a way that losing a WTO panel ruling on steel tariffs simply is not.

This sovereignty sensitivity also creates a credible commitment problem. Even if states negotiated binding migration agreements, domestic political shifts could render compliance untenable overnight. Electoral cycles in receiving countries regularly produce policy reversals on migration that would be unthinkable in trade. This volatility makes other states reluctant to invest in institutional frameworks that their partners may abandon after the next election.

The result is a governance domain where the institutional preconditions for multilateral cooperation—willingness to delegate authority, accept binding rules, and sustain commitments across political cycles—are structurally weaker than in nearly any other area of international economic governance. This is not a problem that better diplomacy alone can solve. It is embedded in the political ontology of the modern state.

Takeaway

Migration governance is institutionally thin not because states are short-sighted, but because controlling who enters the political community is treated as constitutive of sovereignty in a way that trade and finance are not—making delegation to international institutions structurally harder.

In the absence of robust multilateral frameworks, migration governance has developed through a dense but fragmented landscape of bilateral agreements, memoranda of understanding, and ad hoc arrangements. This is not a transitional phase on the way to multilateralism. It is a stable equilibrium that reflects the structural incentives facing states in the migration domain.

Bilateral arrangements persist because they give both parties something multilateral frameworks cannot: specificity and control. A labor migration agreement between Germany and a North African state can be tailored to particular sectors, skill levels, and timeframes. It can include return provisions, training commitments, and quota adjustments that respond to the specific political economies of both parties. Multilateral rules, by definition, require generalization—and generalization in migration governance is precisely what states resist.

This bilateralism also reflects a fundamental power asymmetry that receiving states prefer to maintain. In bilateral negotiations, wealthy destination countries hold disproportionate leverage. They can offer visa access, development aid, or trade concessions in exchange for migration management cooperation, readmission agreements, or border enforcement. A multilateral framework would diffuse this leverage, empowering coalitions of sending states and introducing norms—such as migrant rights protections—that constrain receiving states' discretion. Major destination countries have little institutional incentive to multilateralize.

The fragmentation has real governance consequences. Bilateral agreements are often opaque, negotiated outside parliamentary oversight, and difficult for civil society to monitor. They create a patchwork of inconsistent standards where a migrant's rights and protections depend entirely on the specific corridor they traverse. The EU's externalization agreements with Libya and Turkey, for instance, have been widely criticized for prioritizing border control over human rights—precisely because they were negotiated bilaterally, outside multilateral normative frameworks.

Institutional designers face a genuine dilemma here. Bilateralism is not merely a failure of cooperation; it is functional for powerful states. Any multilateral migration institution must contend with the fact that the actors whose participation is most essential—major receiving countries—are precisely those with the least incentive to move beyond bilateral arrangements. Building multilateral infrastructure requires offering these states something bilateralism cannot, rather than simply arguing that multilateralism is normatively preferable.

Takeaway

Bilateral migration governance is not a stepping stone toward multilateralism—it is a stable equilibrium that serves the interests of powerful receiving states, and any multilateral architecture must be designed to offer advantages that bilateralism structurally cannot.

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, adopted in 2018, represents the most ambitious attempt to date at comprehensive multilateral migration governance. It is also, by design, non-binding. This was not a concession wrung from reluctant negotiators—it was the explicit precondition for the Compact's existence. Several major receiving states, including the United States, Hungary, and Australia, nonetheless refused to adopt it, illustrating the sovereignty sensitivities discussed above even when no legal obligations are at stake.

Assessing the Compact requires the right analytical framework. Measured against the institutional density of the WTO or the binding authority of the IMF's surveillance mechanisms, it appears trivially weak. But this comparison misses the point. The relevant comparison is not with mature governance regimes but with the institutional baseline in migration—which was effectively zero multilateral framework for regular migration. The Compact established, for the first time, a comprehensive set of shared objectives and a follow-up and review architecture through the International Migration Review Forum.

The Compact's potential lies in what international legal scholars call the dynamic quality of soft law. Non-binding frameworks can generate governance effects through several mechanisms: establishing normative benchmarks against which state behavior is evaluated, creating epistemic communities that develop shared understandings of problems, and building institutional infrastructure that can be progressively strengthened. The Helsinki Final Act of 1975 was non-binding; it nonetheless transformed the normative landscape of European security over two decades.

The critical question is whether the Compact's follow-up architecture is robust enough to generate these dynamic effects. Early evidence is mixed. The first International Migration Review Forum in 2022 produced voluntary pledges from states, but monitoring mechanisms remain weak, civil society access is limited, and the forum lacks the institutional muscle to create meaningful accountability. Without stronger review processes, the Compact risks becoming a repository of aspirational language rather than a foundation for progressive governance development.

For institutional designers, the Compact represents a strategic wager: that in a domain where binding multilateral rules are politically impossible, a well-designed soft law framework can gradually shift state behavior, build cooperative habits, and create institutional path dependencies that make future strengthening more feasible. Whether that wager pays off depends less on the Compact's text than on whether the institutional architecture around it develops sufficient density and legitimacy to matter in practice.

Takeaway

The Global Compact for Migration should be evaluated not against the institutional strength of trade or finance regimes, but as a strategic bet that soft law can create path dependencies and normative benchmarks capable of evolving into stronger governance over time.

The underdevelopment of international migration governance is not an anomaly to be corrected but a structural feature of the international system that reflects the unique political characteristics of human mobility. Sovereignty sensitivity, bilateral power dynamics, and the strategic limitations of existing instruments each constrain what multilateral cooperation can achieve in this domain.

This does not mean institutional progress is impossible. It means that institutional designers must work with the grain of these constraints rather than against them. The most productive path forward likely involves strengthening the review and accountability mechanisms around the Global Compact, developing multilateral platforms that offer receiving states functional advantages over bilateral fragmentation, and building normative consensus incrementally rather than pursuing grand institutional bargains.

The architecture of migration governance will not resemble the WTO or the IMF. It will be something new—a governance form adapted to a domain where sovereignty costs are high, interests are asymmetric, and binding commitments are politically unsustainable. Designing that architecture well is one of the defining institutional challenges of the coming decades.