The Reality of Current US Immigration Policy 51 to be forced back home if there is a threat to life or freedom – yet millions are denied the opportunity to exercise that right, a clear inequity. The proliferation of conflicts, the increase in environmental harms associated with climate change, the growing and increasingly evident social inequity across regions, and demographic transformations are complex factors that all impinge on migration and which must be addressed as part of the answer to unregulated and life-threatening movements of people. Migration cannot be fixed by migration strategies alone. There are no quick fix solutions, as the Trump administration has learnt to its cost. In response to the large-scale flows of desperate distress migrants from Syria and other parts of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa into Europe in 2014 and 2015, the member states of the United Nations embarked on a systematic process to review global migration and refugee flows. In the fall of 2018, they signed two “global compacts,” one on refugees and one on migrants.55 The compacts address many of the complexities bedeviling current migration policy – the lack of responsibility sharing for refugees, the dearth of legal and safe access to migration for many deserving and able populations, the imperative of linking migration and refugee policies with development strategies, and the urgency of attending to the human rights and needs of child migrants, whether accompanied by their families or unaccompanied. A central goal was to create integrated, global strategies for managing migration, sharing responsibility, and more adequately responding to the needs of the many constituencies implicated in contemporary migration. Two years down the line from the initial, vigorous engagement with the global compacts’ project, it is not clear that demonstrable progress has been achieved. The notion that migration management should be linked to development goals – and in particular to Sustainable Development Goal 10.7 that calls on state parties to “[f]acilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through the implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies” – is a powerful one.56 It sets a useful framework for action and for policy development. Several of the alternative policy approaches outlined here are consistent with this development approach. However, opinions differ when it comes to evaluating progress. Although some analysts are disappointed, critical of the fact that little political will has been galvanized and few if any significant improvements in 55 United Nations, Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration, July 13, 2018, https://refugeesmigrants.un.org/sites/default/files/180713_agreed_outcome_global_compact_ for_migration.pdf; United Nations General Assembly, Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees: Part II. Global Compact on Refugees, U.N. Doc. A/73/12 (Part II) (September 13, 2018), www.unhcr.org/gcr/GCR_English.pdf. 56 United Nations General Assembly, Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, U.N. Doc. A/RES/70/1 (October 21, 2015), available at: www.refworld.org/docid/ 57b6e3e44.html; “SDG 10: Reduce Inequality Within and Among Countries,” United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, www.unodc.org/unodc/en/about-unodc/sustainable-developmentgoals/sdg10_-reduce-inequalities.html. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press