This roundtable presents major strands of continuities and changes in global migration systems across the half millennia covered in the two-volume CUGM. Through long histories of topically and regionally wide-ranging analyses of migration, this assemblage of 62 articles by a global array of scholars enables fruitful explorations concerning the nature of migration and migrants in human activities and organizations, representations, and management of mobility. By emphasizing abstractions such as systems, regions, and scales, this session foregrounds migration as an intrinsic aspect of economic, social, environmental, and political systems that operate within and across geographic regions. We examine how advances in communications technologies enabled expansion of economic and political systems by shifting and extending scales of migration networks across regions even as the naturalization of nation-states as the primary political units generated ideologies and institutions asserting tremendous sovereign authority to regulate migration. Even as globalization has intensified reliance on migrants to advance economic, environmental, and political objectives, migrant management regimes have developed that enact stark hierarchies of migration rights differentiated by labor categorization, nationality and international relations, and politicized management of human rights.

Our exploration of these themes and trends launches with Deresse Ayenachew’s tracking across seven centuries “Dynamics of Mobility and Settlement in Africa: The Horn of Africa” up to the 1800s. Filipa Ribeiro da Silva reflects upon systems of “Labor Migration in sub-Saharan Africa Before 1800.” Bertrand Van Ruymbeke examines the goals and effects of imperial policies upon “French and British Migratory Patterns to North America in the Early Modern Period.” We shift to nation-state management of globalized migration systems with “Legal Categories of Displacement in the Early Twentieth Century” by Laura Madokoro. Monique Laney discusses employment markets, credentialed knowledge workers, selective immigration processes in “STEM Migration since World War II.” Madeline Y. Hsu, coeditor of Vol. II, serves as session chair and Catia Antunes, coeditor of Vol. I, serves as discussant.