Policy coherence between migration and development agendas is of increasing interest in current times; there is growing recognition that migration policies should support rather than hinder investment in international development. The United Nations High-level Dialogue of September 2006 and the Global Forum on Migration and Development of July 2007 both raised the attention given to this issue.

Now that the interface between migration and development has been recognized, the challenge is to turn this interest into working-level policies and programmes. The aim of this study is to build on existing international research and take the analysis to the next higher level showing how these connections can be made in practice. Policymakers often focus on remittances as the main means of translating the migration-development nexus into reality. However, this paper shows that there are many stages in the migration cycle, from departure to return and reintegration back home, that present opportunities to make migration more “development friendly” and, conversely, to raise development awareness of migration factors.