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There is growing enthusiasm in academic and policy circles for the positive role that international migrants can play in the development of their home countries and communities. Supranational development organisations, national governments, and other institutions have scrambled to assess the linkages between 'migration and development' and to implement new policies and programs to more effectively 'capture' transnational remittances in order promote greater development outcomes. This international 'migration and development' (MAD) paradigm nevertheless draws heavily on older development models, grounded in modernisation theory, which promoted rapid internal rural-to-urban migration. Yet, these connections are rarely acknowledged or analysed within official policy discourses; rather, this MAD nexus is regularly depicted as a new paradigm, one that exists without historical or ideological context. This paper traces out the conceptual connections between past and contemporary linkages of MAD theory. I argue that relinking internal and international migrations literature in development reveals the ways in which modernisation theories that rest on problematic contrasts between modernity/ tradition and development/backwardness are unconsciously replicated within current policy discourses. Utilising my own research with internal migrants in Thailand, I argue that a return to a close interrogation of the concept of development -as defined by migrant actors themselves -has the potential to both bridge the divide within migration studies and to productively critique migration and development policy discourses in ways that do not elide their historical emergence and political effects.

Over the past decade there has been a surge of academic and policy interest in the contributions of transnational migrants in furthering national development objectives in their 'home' countries. These approaches tend to be bifurcated into two distinct categories: (1) 'diaspora strategies' that target the participation in national development objectives of sought-after elite, high-skilled migrants and (2) migration-as-development strategies, which focus on facilitating and channeling the economic and social remittances of nonelite, low-skilled migrants. Although these broad categorizations have never been entirely adequate in capturing the complexity of international migration flows, a conceptual division between them persists, with very real consequences for state policies in migrant-sending countries in Southeast Asia. This paper explores the separation between diaspora strategies and migration-as-development frameworks through a focus on rights and skills, and questions of relative labour value. I argue that while diaspora strategies and migration-as-development frameworks cannot simply be merged, the academic separation between them should be challenged and more in-depth theoretical engagement should be encouraged. I further suggest that migration policy makers should strive to evaluate their migration policies to address the increasing complexities of contemporary migration.

Within migration studies, the division or 'gap' between internal and international migration research has grown over the past few decades despite growing calls to bring these literatures back into conversation. While distinctions between internal and international migration remain relevant in a world in which states retain the power to shape human movements across scales, this division within migration studies is problematic in light of the increasing complexity of human mobility. Scholars seeking to close the 'gap' highlight the common structural drivers of international and internal migration, and note an increasingly myopic focus on international migration overlooking the important economic and social contributions of internal migrants. While in basic alignment with these arguments, the contributions to this special issue focus instead on critically interrogating the relationship between internal and international migration research with the aim of provoking new insights across disciplinary and categorical boundaries. Each of the papers examines migration phenomena occupying the intellectual and empirical space between normative definitions of 'internal' and 'international' migration in order to relink them methodologically and empirically in contemporary migration research. The contributions included here draw on these migration phenomena that do not fit neatly into normative definitions of 'internal' and 'international' migration with the aim of not only narrowing or closing the 'gap', but of retheorising the relationship between them. The collective focus of this special issue, therefore, is to challenge ontological assumptions of 'migration' as a definable object of study and to theorise migration as a co-constituted and relational process. Copyright

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