The United Nations International Labour Organization in Geneva set up "the MIGRANT Division" to analyse and find solutions to these issues. To lead the unit, the UN appointed Manolo Abella to be Chief of MIGRANT, who is now linked with the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the University of Oxford, and others.

Their stated challenge was to: "Find a free market solution to let employers reap the productivity benefit from decreasing their costs while boosting the income of native workers to the point where their interests become aligned with their employers."

To achieve this goal they decided on a solution. They wrote:

"Native workers will not support programs which lower their total incomes. Yet, migration can be counted upon to produce a reliable net benefit in host countries only if it is allowed to decrease wages. Thus the solution is to realize that total income must rise while wage income is allowed to fall. This suggests that any natural free market solution must involve a natural income stream to host country workers which has previously been obscured or hidden. We then discover that if the (highly valuable) right of host country citizens to block access to labor markets is properly converted into a salable right, workers are made better off (since a salable right is always more financially valuable than a non-salable one). We thus convert the rights to preferential labor market access into rights of workers to license migrant work permits to employers. We find that with a little bit of care the market will now return an efficient solution with all parties being made better off."