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After decades of constant, if not rising, flows of international migration for work or employment purposes, global institutions have come to recognise that a better understanding of the transnational character of labour markets is essential for effective migration governance, with a view to addressing both the drivers of migration (i.e., the 'root causes') and the negative consequences of migration (i.e., discrimination, rights violations, and exploitation). This chapter argues that migration governance, as the outcome of global processes, has been subordinated to economically instrumentalist objectives, by means of which those participating in migration processes - which can include states, corporations, employers, bureaucrats, and the raft of labour market intermediaries that lubricate labour mobility - have attempted to capture the material benefits generated through labour migration, while minimising the costs they can incur and, frequently, endeavouring to externalise costs that arise in the course of managing migrants and/or migration. In light of these institutional and political challenges, this chapter focuses on the leadership potential of the ILO in a world where the multilateral level of governance needs to achieve a better balance between the 'migration' and 'labour' dimensions if the system is not to regress into an ever deepening fragmentation and erosion of workers' rights at the intersection of authoritarian national and global supply chain capitalisms.

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