Jonathan Prentice currently serves as the Head of Secretariat for the United Nations Network on Migration. He has twenty-four years of experience working for the United Nations and International Crisis Group in political analysis, human rights and protection, and migration, including postings in New York, Brussels, Jakarta, Geneva, Baghdad, Dili, and Phnom Penh.
Migration in 2019 is at once polarising and unifying. There was thus something a little paradoxical about the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM), adopted last December in Marrakech and subsequently endorsed, in New York, by the General Assembly. The creation of the Compact revealed at one and the same time both the intensely politicised nature of the discourse on migration yet also the clear recognition of the need to come together if its advantages are to be maximised and downsides minimised.