A/HRC/32/40 12. Traditionally, migration has only been regulated at the national level, with migration and trade considerations operating in separate spheres. With globalization, however, trade policies and migration policies have become more interconnected owing to the desire to liberalize economies and facilitate the mobility of labour between countries and regions. Migrants are rarely viewed as people with rights, but instead as “factors of production” in trade and may be “commoditized”3 in terms of the services they can provide or the goods they can produce. Even in the current neoliberal economic climate, trade negotiators are often confronted with barriers, such as restrictive immigration policies, obstacles to visa issuance, discrimination against foreign workers and limited recognition of professional qualifications, that are shaped by fluctuating labour market needs and national security concerns. 13. Migration schemes, which also respond to regional variations in sectoral demands for labour and migratory patterns, have not managed to keep pace with the rapid increase in mobility. This has triggered a resurgence of non-traditional, precarious and informal types of work that exist beyond the regulatory framework, especially in economic sectors, such as domestic work, agriculture, food processing and packaging, construction, hospitality, health and elderly care, tourism, fisheries and extraction, that can be delocalized only with difficulty. Limited treatment of migrants in multilateral trade negotiations 14. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade first introduced the concept of a multilateral trading system founded on the principles of non-discrimination and reciprocity. Adopted after the end of the Second World War, the Agreement aimed to significantly reduce tariffs and barriers to trade worldwide. 15. The Uruguay round of negotiations (1986-1994) ambitiously sought to expand the competence of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade into new areas, such as trade in services, capital, intellectual property, textiles and agriculture, but focused almost exclusively on persons linked to a commercial presence (intra-corporate transferees) and high-skilled labour. Limited mention of labour in the multilateral system occurs in the General Agreement on Trade in Services, mode IV, specifically article I:2 (d), which covers the mobility of “natural persons who are service suppliers of a Member, and natural persons of a Member who are employed by a service supplier of a Member, in respect of the supply of a service”. According to the annex on movement of natural persons supplying services under the Agreement, mode IV does not concern itself with individuals seeking access to the employment market in the destination country, nor does it affect processes regarding citizenship, residence or employment on a permanent basis. 16. While some States have insisted that the World Trade Organization (WTO) address the issue of “social dumping” through the inclusion of trade provisions requiring States parties to observe minimum workers’ rights, the responsibility of regulating labour standards has been kept outside of multilateral trade negotiations. 17. Since 2001, several attempts have been made during the Doha round to expand the classes of workers covered by the General Agreement on Trade in Services, by recognizing developing countries’ comparative advantage across specific service sectors and abandoning the economic needs test, which leaves States wide discretion on which workers to admit. Even after the 2015 WTO ministerial conference in Nairobi, however, negotiations have still not resulted in solid commitments to low-wage labour. 3 See the Declaration concerning the Aims and Purposes of the International Labour Organization, in which the ILO General Conference reaffirmed that labour is not a commodity. 5