"International Migrations: a Global Issue" Catherine de Wenden, CNRS research director: CERI - Sciences Po. -Freedom of movement is something that the global migration governance particularly pushes for, but it is also at the heart of several contradictions. One contradiction is that major immigration countries, especially the European countries and the United States, have liberal economies, while also having a heavily security-based approach to border management. How to reconcile a market economy where all factors or production are liberalized with borders which are closed to people? This is the first contradiction. Another contradiction is that these countries consider themselves defenders of human rights while migration management often leads them to violate human rights on their own territory or in the regions the migrants originate from or where the migrants are deported to. This is a second contradiction. Third, there are various phenomena stemming from interdependence. Here are a few examples which illustrate how things could be improved by an efficient governance of international migrations. Let us consider development policies. For instance, the price of cotton is set by the WTO and it can have a catastrophic effect on the migration flows. Some producers receive subsidies from their countries, in the United States, for instance, or work within a state production, as is the case in Uzbekistan. In other countries, producers receive nothing and depend on the price of cotton, as is the case in Africa. Most of the time, when the price of cotton drops, internal migrations increase before becoming international because cotton has lost its worth. Another example are the economics of coffee. To develop some of the departure countries, the World Bank and the IMF decided to support coffee production in Vietnam but did not realize that the low salaries in the country would create competition for other major coffee producers, such as Central America. The development of coffee in Asia had disastrous effects on the mobility of Central American coffee producers who started migrating toward Mexico, and then the United States. Another example is the Asian presence in Africa. Asian countries consume a lot of fish, which leads to overfishing, which in turn deprives African fishermen of their resources, leading them potentially to migrate. If they exploit raw materials and if the local population are not able to exploit their own raw materials, this will create even higher unemployment than already exists. Another element in this context, is that if all infrastructures are built by Asian countries in exchange for the exploitation of raw materials, the population will not have access to the construction industry which is created there either. The goal is also to reflect on interdependence. Another example are simply international relations. When the International Coalition between the US and Europe went to Afghanistan, nobody realized that six million people would leave Afghanistan. Did they go to the US? No, they went to neighboring countries or Europe. The same thing happened in Iraq. An unforeseen consequence was the hemorrhage of the population. So these multilateral management mechanisms aim at introducing these complex elements, at recognizing that migration is a factor of human development and at avoiding negative effects caused by a reflection based on very narrow scopes of competence without taking interdependence into account, which can have unexpected effects on migrations depending on the region.