Can politicians effectively control national borders even if they wish to do so? How do politically powerless migrants relate to more privileged migrants and to national citizens? Is it possible for capital to move to labour rather than vice versa? In this book Robin Cohen shows how the preferences, interests and actions of the three major social actors in international migration policy - global capital, migrant labour and national politicians - intersect and often contradict each other. Cohen addresses these vital questions in a wide-ranging, lucid and accessible account of the historical origins and contemporary dynamics of global migration.Robin Cohen is ESRC Professional Research Fellow and Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. He served as Dean of Humanities at the University of Cape Town while on long leave from Warwick in 2001-3, and directed the nationally designated UK Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations from 1985-9. He has held full-time appointments at the Universities of Birmingham, Ibadan and the West Indies, and seasonal appointments at Stanford University, University of Toronto and University of California at Berkeley. His many books include The New Helots: Migrants in the International Division of Labour (Ashgate, 1987). He is the editor of the UCL Press/Routledge/Washington University Press series on Global Diasporas and of the Cambridge Survey of World Migration (1995). His work has been translated into Danish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese and Spanish.