5.3

The global political trend towards laissez-faire economic policies since the 1980s resulted in the gradual, although irregular, lifting of international barriers for trade and capital flows., The agenda for domestic and international economic deregulation was pushed by the governments of US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, giving the global trend towards laissez-faire economic policies a momentum., The trend accelerated after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, heralding an age of “market triumphalism” and the Washington Consensus’s dominance on the importance of market liberalization, privatization, and deregulation., Increasing trade, investment, communication, and international aid appears to reinforce migration links and vice versa. It confirms the key proposition of migration systems theory that one form of exchange, such as trade between countries or places, is likely to engender other forms of exchange between people.