The General Assembly adopted this comprehensive treaty aiming to guarantee migrant workers and their families basic human rights regardless of legal status, covering fair wages, healthcare access, and protection from arbitrary expulsion. Though championed by labor-sending countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the convention took 13 years to gather enough ratifications to enter into force, and no major migrant-receiving country in Western Europe or North America has ever ratified it, limiting its practical impact.
The convention emerged from decades of lobbying by countries whose citizens increasingly worked abroad as guest laborers, domestic workers, and undocumented migrants in wealthier nations. Its 93 articles laid out sweeping protections: the right to transfer earnings home, freedom from confiscation of identity documents, access to emergency medical care, and due process before deportation, protections that existing human rights treaties addressed only partially or ambiguously.
The treaty's adoption in December 1990 reflected a particular moment, as labor migration from South Asia to the Gulf states and from Latin America to the United States was surging, exposing workers to exploitation with little international legal recourse. Yet the very nations receiving the most migrants, wealthy destinations in North America, Europe, and the oil-rich Gulf, declined to sign on, wary of extending guaranteed rights to undocumented workers.
The convention finally entered into force in 2003 after the 20th ratification, primarily from labor-exporting nations like Mexico, Morocco, and the Philippines. December 18 was later designated International Migrants Day in commemoration, a date now marked annually even as the treaty itself remains, in the eyes of many advocates, a symbolically important but practically toothless instrument, unratified by the countries where most migrants actually live and work.