The New Migration and Development Optimism: A Review of the 2009 Human Development Report (Global INSIGHTS) (UN Development Programme, Human Development Report 2009, Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development) (Book Review‪)‬

UN Development Programme, Human Development Report 2009, Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). MIGRATION CAN BENEFIT EVERYBODY IF POLICY SETTINGS ARE RIGHT, SAYS the new migration and development optimism, encapsulated in the 2009 Human Development Report. Latest in the twenty-year-old flagship series of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development (hereafter, Overcoming Barriers) is a remarkable achievement. It explores the migration and development nexus from all angles, offering state-of-the-art assessments of migration's impacts on development and vice versa, and of how these impacts differ for sending areas, receiving areas, and migrants themselves. It questions common misconceptions about migration, refutes pessimistic arguments, criticizes poor policies, and recommends new ones "with a view to expanding peoples' freedoms" (p. 5). And it does all this in around 112 pithy pages of text (excluding references and appendices) representing just one year's work. By consolidating the new migration and development optimism as an international policy orthodoxy, the report also reveals a lot about and perhaps has implications for the global governance of migration.