8 Migration

Over 280 million people live outside their country of birth (hedge numbers; roughly 3.5% of humanity — most migration is South–South or within regions). Categories: voluntary labour migration vs. forced displacement (refugees, the internally displaced); the 1951 Refugee Convention and UNHCR regime; the ILO and the 1990 Migrant Workers Convention (the least-ratified major instrument — developing states its partisans); trafficking and smuggling protocols (Palermo, 2000). Drivers: wage differentials, demographic asymmetries, conflict and climate; the migration–development nexus: remittances (hundreds of billions annually, exceeding ODA), brain drain vs. brain circulation, diaspora politics. Governance trend: the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (2018, non-binding) after the 2015–16 European "refugee crisis" the securitization of borders vs. labour-market demand (the West's "need vs. fear" dilemma; the Gulf's kafala system and its reform). Nepal — the paragraph the examinerexpects: one of the world's highest remittance-to-GDP ratios (remittances sustaining the external sector — on the order of a quarter of GDP, hedged); labour destinations shifting from India to the Gulf and Malaysia; the Foreign Employment Act 2064's protection framework, the 2014 free-visa- free-ticket reform, reintegration programmes, and the scandals that birthed them (exploitation, deaths in the Gulf heat, trafficking); women migrants' protection vs. rights tension (the ban-and- conditional-permit history); and the governance question: migration as development strategy or as symptom of an economy that cannot…