Foundations of multilayered migration governance in legal theory

Global administrative law explains the trend towards flat regulatory cross-border cooperation among government agencies, international organisations, private sector and non-governmental organisations, which occurs transnationally rather than internationally. The concept fits well with the informalised law of treaty-making in the field of labour migration and offers potential for innovative research, as it has so far only been applied to international finance and health law. This project will firstly describe the trend towards informalised “treaty”-making processes in global migration management. The second step will be to take stock of key global administrative law “moments” in such agreements, by applying to migration agreements, the four categories of “administration” identified in the literature in this field: 1) formal international organisations 2) collective action by trans-national networks of cooperative arrangements 2) distributed administration by national regulators under treaty, network, or other cooperative regimes 3) hybrid intergovernmental–private arrangements 4) by private institutions with regulatory functions. It will test the hypothesis whether migration agreements are an appropriate application for GAL and whether “global administrative space” is created for the purpose of increasing the host country’s comfort level. It will further ask whether delegation to private actors lowers opportunity costs and increases levels of admissions for migrant workers.