About 86 million people are working outside their native countries and the number of economic migrants will increase rapidly because globalisation has failed to create more jobs in their home nations, the International Labour Organisation said Friday.
But the ILO underlined that migration brought huge economic benefits and called for a concerted international effort to manage the trend rather than to stifle it.
A report by the agency said better international co-operation would not only harness economic growth in the migrants' native and destination countries, but also counter major social problems or abuse of immigrant labour.
"Migration must be, and be seen to be, a "win-win" proposition for all," it said.
During the 1990s, the total number of migrants in the world - including refugees - increased by six million a year to reach 175 million in 2000. About half of them are economically active, the report said.
Thirty-two million of those who sought a better livelihood abroad are currently working in developing countries, it revealed.
"If you look at the global economy in the perspective of people, its biggest structural failure is the inability to create enough jobs where people live," the ILO's Director General Juan Somavia said.
"We should consider ways of providing decent work to this vast flow of migrants through multilateral actions and policies," he added.
The report advocated "a fair deal" for migrant workers, pointing out that they help rejuvenate ageing populations and stimulate inflation-free growth in their host countries.
Migrant workers also send huge amounts of money back to their homes, also fuelling growth in some of the world's poorest countries, it added.
The World Bank estimated that migrants sent 80 billion dollars in remittances back home in 2002, making it the second largest source of external funding for developing countries.
However, the ILO admitted that it was "one of the most complex policy challenges for governments".
They needed "to argue the rational case for migration" to convince domestic electorates who fear they will lose jobs to immigrants or are influenced by xenophobia.
"There are difficult trade-offs, and some degree of conflict is unavoidable and even desirable in democratic societies," the report said.
About 10 to 15 percent of migrants were working illegally in their host country, it estimated, exposing them to abuse and exploitation.
And irregular migration was rising rapidly partly due to the failure to channel flows at international level, apart from a few bilateral agreements between destination and host countries mainly in Asia and the Gulf region.
"The extent of the flows of irregular workers is a strong indication that the demand for regular migrant workers is not being matched by the supply," the UN labour agency said.
"Unless the international community acts, this situation is likely to worsen," it warned.
Contrary to popular belief, the rising wave of migration was not confined to movements from poor countries to the industrialised west, the ILO report pointed out.
While the proportion of poor-country migrants to industrialised countries had risen in the 1990s, as a whole immigrants only formed 4.2 percent of the workforce in industrialised countries in 1998, the most recent figure available.
Nearly half of all reported economic migrants move from one developing country to another, the ILO said, citing the examples of Egyptians going to Jordan, Indonesians to Malaysia or Argentineans heading to neighbouring countries.
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