Much of the burgeoning literature on international migration focuses either on the policies and politics of the destination states or on the demographic outcomes in licit and illicit movement. This book's subject is neither of those. It looks instead at the organizations involved in efforts to manage or respond to migratory flows and at how they work together—or, as often, at cross-purposes—in efforts to manage migration. Its author, Andrew Geddes, is director of the Migration Policy Centre at the European University Institute. His source material is more than 400 interviews with officials in national governments, international and regional agencies, and NGOs. The interviews asked “migration governance actors” and observers about deceptively simple issues: how actors think about or make sense of the situations they confront, and what they think they should be doing, given their limited information, their risk aversion, their need to work with others involved, and the organizational cultures of which they are part. Snippets from respondents' comments—often wry, sometimes caustic—enliven the text.

The empirical core of the book consists of four regional case studies of migration governance: Southeast Asia, South America, Europe, and North America. In Southeast Asia migration flows within the region are dominated by temporary labor migration, much of it irregular. ASEAN's moves toward a single market stop short of free movement. The fraught experience of the Rohingyas, expelled from Myanmar and hoping to land in Thailand or Malaysia—all ASEAN member countries—shows the absence of any effective regional migration governance. (A looser institutional framework known as the Bali Process tries to deal with irregular migration on a bilateral basis.) South America, in contrast, is portrayed as “a progressive trailblazer for a more open and rights-based approach to migration”—at least since the liberalization wave of the 2000s. The largest recent migrations have been the Venezuelan displacement, entailing a large-scale outflow mainly to Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Migration within the MERCOSUR area for member-country nationals is fairly straightforward, but an effort to create a more inclusive South American identity faltered in the 2010s.

In Europe, labor mobility was a fundamental EU tenet, as was visa-free movement under the Schengen Agreement. This was largely uncontroversial until the near doubling of EU member states after 2004. Subsequently, and especially after the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis, free movement became politicized, “enmeshed with the ‘immigration’ issue”—a factor, for instance, in the Brexit referendum. (Writing of himself, Geddes remarks that “a stony silence is likely to descend if a researcher during an interview with EU officials, refers to free movement by EU citizens as migration.”) Deterring economic migrants and asylum-seekers from the Middle East and Africa has become a major EU project. Finally, in North America “there is no formal regional migration governance and no realistic possibility of it developing.” NAFTA and its successor treaty deliberately excluded labor migration. The US Congress has been deadlocked on immigration since the last major policy reform in 1986, with political attention focused on how to treat the large irregular population potentially subject to deportation and on securing the porous southern border.

The contrasts in the governance of migration across these regional settings are of considerable interest and give the book its substance. In each of the regions, the governance task is organizationally complex; in Europe and North America, particularly, there are crowded fields of actors and scant overall coherence in perceptions and response. Immigration, it seems, is not a problem with a solution, but an ongoing predicament, more or less manageable. In place of well-defined laws and policies bearing on migration, there are what the author terms “migration governance repertoires” reflecting the de facto range of responses of actors within their limits of knowledge, organizational constraints, and performative inclinations.

There is a chapter on prospects for global migration governance, which are deemed remote. The 2018 Global Compacts on migration and refugees were nonbinding commitments on states and thereby intendedly nonthreatening, but seen, by both their proponents and by those states (like the United States) that refused to sign, as steps toward a governance regime. More promising are less ambitious forms of international cooperation that over time can change the norms of behavior of states through nudging and persuasion.

The author is at pains to explain his analytical frame, which is done repeatedly, though not for this reader very successfully. Readable, the book is not. As a fairly typical example of its language: “In terms of knowledge claims, social effects, affective dimensions, and performative components, the global governance of migration is a restricted domain within which the transgovernmental has been enabled and within which the transnational in terms of participation by migrants and their civil society representatives has been present but more limited in its impact.” Nonetheless the many insights in the book show through. It is a distinct contribution.—G.McN.

许多关于国际移民的新兴文献要么关注目的地国的政策和政治，要么关注合法和非法流动的人口结果。本书的主题都不是这些。相反，它着眼于参与管理或响应迁移流的组织，以及它们如何在管理迁移的过程中协同工作——或者通常是跨目的工作。其作者 Andrew Geddes 是欧洲大学研究所移民政策中心的主任。他的原始资料是对国家政府、国际和地区机构以及非政府组织官员的 400 多次采访。采访向“移民治理参与者”和观察者询问了看似简单的问题：参与者如何思考或理解他们面临的情况，考虑到他们有限的信息、他们的风险规避、他们与其他相关人员合作的需要以及他们所在的组织文化，他们认为他们应该做什么。来自受访者评论的片段——通常是讽刺的，有时是刻薄的——使文本活跃起来。

本书的实证核心包括四个关于移民治理的区域案例研究：东南亚、南美、欧洲和北美。在东南亚，该地区的移民流动主要是临时劳动力移民，其中大部分是非正规的。东盟向单一市场迈进的步伐没有自由流动。罗兴亚人被驱逐出缅甸并希望登陆泰国或马来西亚——所有东盟成员国——的令人担忧的经历表明，缺乏任何有效的区域移民治理。（一个被称为巴厘岛进程的宽松制度框架试图在双边基础上处理非正常移民问题。）相比之下，南美洲被描述为“一个更开放和基于权利的移民方法的进步开拓者”——至少自 2000 年代的自由化浪潮以来。最近最大的移民是委内瑞拉流离失所，导致大规模外流，主要流向哥伦比亚、厄瓜多尔和秘鲁。对于成员国国民来说，在南方共同市场地区内的移民相当简单，但在 2010 年代，建立更具包容性的南美身份的努力却步履蹒跚。

在欧洲，劳动力流动是欧盟的一项基本原则，申根协定下的免签证流动也是如此。这在很大程度上是没有争议的，直到 2004 年之后欧盟成员国几乎翻了一番。随后，特别是在 2015 年叙利亚难民危机之后，自由流动变得政治化，“与‘移民’问题纠缠在一起”——例如，英国脱欧中的一个因素公投。（格德斯在自己的文章中写道，“如果研究人员在接受欧盟官员采访时将欧盟公民的自由流动称为移民，那么可能会陷入僵硬的沉默。”）阻止来自中东的经济移民和寻求庇护者非洲已成为欧盟的一个重大项目。最后，在北美“没有正式的区域移民治理，也没有发展它的现实可能性。” 北美自由贸易协定及其后续条约故意排除劳务移民。自 1986 年上一次重大政策改革以来，美国国会在移民问题上一直陷入僵局，政治注意力集中在如何对待可能被驱逐出境的大量非正常人口以及确保漏洞百出的南部边境。

这些区域环境中移民治理的对比引起了人们的极大兴趣，并为本书提供了实质内容。在每个地区，治理任务在组织上都很复杂；尤其是在欧洲和北美，参与者的领域很拥挤，并且在感知和反应方面缺乏整体一致性。移民似乎不是一个有解决方案的问题，而是一个持续的困境，或多或少是可控的。代替明确定义的与移民有关的法律和政策，有作者所谓的“移民治理曲目”，反映了行动者在其知识、组织约束和执行倾向范围内的实际反应范围。

有一章是关于全球移民治理前景的，这被认为是遥远的。2018 年关于移民和难民的全球契约是对各国的不具约束力的承诺，因此有意不具威胁性，但被其支持者和拒绝签署的那些国家（如美国）视为迈向治理制度的步骤。更有希望的是不那么雄心勃勃的国际合作形式，随着时间的推移，它们可以通过推动和说服来改变国家的行为规范。

作者煞费苦心地解释他的分析框架，这个分析框架反复进行，尽管对这位读者来说不是很成功。可读性强，书不行。作为其语言的一个相当典型的例子：“就知识主张、社会影响、情感维度和表演成分而言，全球移民治理是一个受限制的领域，在这个领域内，跨政府得以启用，而跨国移民及其民间社会代表的参与一直存在，但其影响更为有限。” 尽管如此，书中的许多见解都显示出来了。这是一个独特的贡献。——G.McN。