Book Review

Migration is an ancient phenomenon. The ongoing Syrian war, the subsequent Mediterranean refugee crisis, and events like Brexit indicate that migration is still salient in the twenty-first century. The role of international law in the field of migration is complex as there is no comprehensive legal instrument governing migration. As a result, the field is characterised by a diverse set of human rights instruments protecting various facets of forced and voluntary migration. Thus, the international law governing migration is fragmented in nature and lacks a self-contained regime. International Law and Migration, edited by Vincent Chetail, is a timely contribution as it successfully captures the great diversity of international legal scholarship on migration. The two-volume book is a compilation of thirty-three major essays dating from 1975 to 2014 that address multiple aspects of the impact of international law on migration. The first volume covers dominant areas like sovereignty, citizenship, alienage and globalisation, and explores broader issues such as the right to admission of aliens and treatment of non-citizens. The second volume engages with critical topics such as migrant workers and refugees in contemporary international law. The book draws upon heterogeneous sources, from works in critical legal studies and legal pluralism to feminism and Third World approaches to migration, in order to underline the diverse opinions in the field and provide an alternative perspective on migration and international law. Volume I, Part I: ‘Peoples on theMove, Sovereignty andGlobalization’, is dedicated to the central features of international migration law, that is, admission, expulsion, and emigration. In the contemporary era of globalisation, a universally accepted proposition has been set: namely, that a State has the right to exclude all aliens, as it is the ‘last bastion of sovereignty’. However, in ‘The General Admission of Aliens under International Law’ (Volume I, Chapter 1), James AR Nafziger underlines the fact that the rules, principles, and procedures governing aliens and the outright expulsion of aliens are of recent origin, developed in the period following World War I and the Great Depression of the 1930s. To support this claim, Nafziger and, separately, Satvinder S Juss in ‘Free Movement and the World Order’ (Volume I, Chapter 4) examine the literature of historians and publicists, curiously limited to the positivist tradition, to argue that the notion of the denial of admission to aliens has little foundation in history or jurisprudence. Traditionally, international law has always favoured the admission of aliens with limited restrictions. The claim of limited restrictions is based on ordre public, which qualifies a duty on the part of the State to admit aliens ‘when they pose no serious danger to its public safety,