The 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda was launched in 2015.v Migrant civil society successfully lobbied, in conjunction with international agencies and other stakeholders, to ensure that migrants and migration would appear explicitly in the Agenda. This is reflected in Target 10.7, to facilitate ‘safe, orderly and regular migration’, and in references throughout the text to the need for non-discrimination according to migratory status for example. During this period, there was also growing concern about emergency migration. This led to the decision to hold an emergency summit to respond to ‘large movements of refugees and migrants’ globally. It was held in September 2016 at the UN Headquarters in New York. The New York Declaration, its outcome document, set the parameters for the development of two ‘compacts’.vi The first would relate to refugees (GCR).vii The second would be for ‘safe, orderly and regular migration’ (GCM). Neither of these will be binding treaties, but rather statements of commitment. The GCM has been developed in three phases: consultation, stock-taking, and negotiation. Following consultation with a range of stakeholders, the zero draft of the GCM document was produced. The content of this text was then negotiated from February to July 2018, to produce the final draft.viii This process will culminate with a summit to adopt the final text in Marrakech in December 2018. As well as the creation of the GCM and the GCR, this period represents a significant reorganisation of global migration governance institutions. At the 2016 Summit, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) was officially made into a related agency to the UN. The IOM has played a driving role both in the GCM process and in re-designing institutional structures, such as the ‘UN Migration Network’, the format of which will soon be announced. This period of significant change represents an opportunity for advocacy and for reframing how statelessness is addressed in global migration governance. Statelessness in the Compact Statelessness has long been largely absent from considerations relating to global migration governance. This also reflects a broader absence of statelessness from global policy frameworks and relative ignorance of statelessness among global actors.ix Yet statelessness is addressed in the New York Declaration and in the drafts of both the global compacts. The annexed Table 1 shows the different ways this is done and how it has changed through the drafting process. While the zero draft of the GCR addressed statelessness weakly, the final draft is more extensive and takes a stronger, more explicit, rights-based focus. The evolution in the GCM has gone in the other direction. Published following the consultation period, the content of the zero draft of the GCM, while imperfect, was stronger and more rights-focused than many observers anticipated. It formalised the consideration of statelessness in the context of global migration governance. It also offered concrete ways to improve conditions for stateless persons and those at risk of statelessness, and to avoid risk of statelessness. This attention to statelessness is contained within Objective 4 of the GCM which relates to legal identity and documentation. The final draft of the GCM differs in key ways. There are some things to be celebrated in the final draft. For a start, it still recognises the need to consider statelessness in global migration governance. The document also includes recognition of the obligation under international law to eliminate gender discrimination in nationality laws. It will be important to build upon this, as well as the material set out in the zero draft, during the implementation phase. However, there is also reason for both disappointment and serious concern with the final draft of the GCM, and specifically with regard to Objective 4 to ensure that all migrants have proof of legal identity and adequate documentation. As can be seen in the annexed Table 1, it retracts in almost every dimension from commitments in the zero draft both to protect the rights of stateless persons and to avoid the risk of 3 of 10