.
The response of the international community to the Vietnamese boat people in 1970s is such an example. The situation today is different. The cold war rivalries between East and West have diminished and flight from targeted political persecution has substantially waned. For instance, whereas through the 1980s, there was a great deal of flight from communism/authoritarianism in Central/South America and Southeast Asia, there is very little politically motivated flight from those countries today. The kind of flight we have today is more a function of the differences between North and South, the haves and the have-nots. This sort of migration is typically (though not always) more generalized than was the kind of flight that defined the migrant crises during the Cold War. The migrant crises of today are the result of ever widening economic disparities and not nearly so ideologically based. And, in general, this flight tends much more to be en masse than individual or discrete groups of individuals and the regime of particularized persecution was not designed to address and cannot effectively address this kind of mass flight. Further, owing to climate related resource conflict and the widening gulf between North and South, mass flight is going to be a growing part of the international landscape for the foreseeable future. This could be flight from generalized violence, natural disasters or mass ethnic flight.
The Global immigration is no longer a divide between the North and the South or a one-way road, rather referring to an increasing number of countries and groups that are involved in mass population flows. Migration occurs voluntary and forced at a variety of scales: intercontinental (between continents), intracontinental (between countries on a given continent), and interregional (within countries). Therefore, the governance of both forced and voluntary migration has been a challenge for policy makers.
