Integrating Migration


What is "integrating", or "mainstreaming", migration?

Migrants often face particular vulnerabilities, but they also bring unique contributions to our communities. Our approach aims to truly “leave no one behind” and instead ensures every person is able to achieve their full potential. With governments, we leverage good migration governance to achieve the 2030 Agenda. With UN Agencies, we include migrants as an essential aspect within their development planning and programming. And with development cooperation actors, we enhance development projects with due consideration of migrants. Finally, we support each of these key actors to leverage the potential of migrants to recover better from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Image
Woman scientist

We support our partners to integrate or “mainstream” migration to achieve “policy coherence.” This means that we ensure migrants and displaced people are considered in all policies, not just migration policies. And this means that we help coordinate horizontally across policy areas (e.g., between Ministries of Education and Labour) and vertically between different levels of governance (e.g., between local and national government), to ensure all our work protects and empowers migrants to be agents of sustainable development. These concepts are enshrined in the Global Compact for Migration’s (GCM) whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches.

By integrating migration into development policies and practices, we ensure that migrants’ needs, voices, capabilities, and specific considerations are respected, included, and responded to in order to empower migrants as actors for development. Click on a sub-section below for specific information, guidance materials, and case studies on how we work to harness migration’s development potential with:

  1. local and national governments,
  2. UN Development System,
  3. development cooperation actors and 
  4. practitioners addressing the socio-economic recovery from COVID-19.

Need more tools on the SDGs? Check out the this UN SDG Knowledge Bank.