The Emerging Markets Symposium (EMS) was created in 2008 as an academic initiative of Green Templeton College (GTC). The EMS is an expression of GTC’s commitment to promote understanding of the issues of managing human welfare in the modern world and the flow of ideas across traditional disciplinary and professional boundaries.

Human migration is a defining theme of the 21St century: three-quarters of a billion migrants live in their birth countries; almost a quarter of a billion migrants live outside them; sixty five million people are internationally and internally displaced; twenty three million refugees are under UNHCR or UNWRA protection.

On 3 December 2017, the USA withdrew from the Global Compact for Migration because it was deemed incompatible with US immigration policies and national sovereignty. It did not withdraw from the Global Compact on Refugees. Both compacts are grounded in decades of preparation. The Compacts on Migration (shaken but not broken by US withdrawal) and the Compact on Refugees are the most important efforts, ever, to grapple with uncommonly critical, intransigent and wicked problems (see refugeesmigrants.un.org/migration-compact and refugeesmigrants.un.org/refugees-compact ). The compacts, that will be considered by the UN General Assembly in September 2018, will not fully resolve the issues they address. But, like the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (December 2015), they will offer a framework for multilateral action.

The EMS Panel Discussion on 12 January 2018 will be authoritative, informative and provocative. It will raise relatively benign (what is the nature and purpose of the compacts?) and neuralgic questions: what is at stake; what are the constraints; what could happen if the compacts are adopted; what will happen if the world neglects the opportunities they present?

Copies of previous EMS reports can be downloaded from the EMS website ems.gtc.ox.ac.uk/content/publications-and-reports .