Payments for areas subject to disputed ownership could be held in escrow, providing real incentives to regularise land tenure.

ECONOMIST: Letters

In the past year agreements have been reached with Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos to try to regularise the flow of migrants coming purely for economic reasons.

ECONOMIST: South-East Asia's refugees

Co-operation between the Bolivian and Argentine police is expected to continue, in a broad attempt both to regularise the situation of adult illegal immigrants and to repatriate minors.

ECONOMIST: Bolivia

Like Mr Bush, they support a proposal, drafted in the Senate with bipartisan support, which would combine tighter border security with increased legal migration and steps to regularise the status of undocumented migrants.

ECONOMIST: Latin America and the United States

But from 2005 onwards, a hysterical Republican reaction to the prospect of immigration reform (which aimed, among other things, to regularise the position of the 12m or so illegal immigrants living, for the most part peacefully and industriously, within America's borders) undid all that.

ECONOMIST: The power of America��s fastest-growing minority