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International regimes govern how officials address specific issue areas in global politics. There is a deep and unresolved debate as to whether we can speak of an international migration regime. This article seeks to develop the theoretical language to resolve this debate. We introduce the concept of a 'distributive regime': a structure that coordinates movement and settlement control practices in ways that engender ideal distributions of populations across space. The paper demonstrates the discriminatory power of this concept by using it to shed light on analogous forms of movement and settlement control in the study of slavery and incarceration. We then suggest that we could resolve the extant debate about the status of the international migration regime by further exploring the hypothesis that contemporary migration control practices are coordinated in ways that achieve a distributive effect.