By definition ‘human’ rights apply to ‘everyone’. In practice, despite the post-World War II consensus on the universality of rights, there has been significant variance of state practice from this principle, with increasingly differentiated restrictions on migrants as rights holders. This is itself reflected in the United Nations (UN) Migrant Worker Convention, sitting alone among the core UN human rights treaties in having a low rate of ratification, and having been largely shunned by migrant-receiving states. Original provisions of other core UN treaties, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), permitted differentiations between citizens and non-citizens. While the evolving interpretation of the ICERD has led to this not extending to discrimination, the international human rights system is clearly a long way from affording effective protection to people who are not citizens of a state. Into this context came the global financial crisis, the forced migration of millions of refugees from areas at war (such as Syria and Myanmar), and the rise of ‘populist’ ethnocentric governments challenging basic human rights protections for migrants and refugees. A major tendency of such movements has been the fuelling of anti-migrant and refugee racism, even in places such as Hungary where there is little migration (Guild, 2018: 661– 663). The impact of such practices is manifest not so much in amending migrant flows dependent on other factors, but in a further squeeze on the rights of migrants and refugees, and the dismantling of existing standards. In 2016 the UN General Assembly adopted the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, from which, in 2018, flowed separate Global Compacts on Migration which reiterated undertakings on the human rights of migrants. All in all there has been little practical strengthening of effective rights protections. This chapter will outline these developments and seek to highlight the distance yet to travel for human rights to effectively apply to ‘everyone’ who is human.

Migration: regional changes, global connections

The movement of people is a global issue, yet given the hyperbole that can often surround the subject it is worth noting that the vast majority of the world's population goes nowhere.