This paper explores the links between migration and poverty, and their implications for social policy. It argues that research on linkages between migration and poverty can, and should, start with knowledge about poverty itself: what it is, what causes it, what reduces it, poor people's agency as well as constraints, and so on. Poverty research offers several established understandings on the natures, structures and processes driving poverty, and these should be central to how the issues are framed in migration research and policy. Much of the migration of the poor is not seriously recognized, and nor are major categories of the poorest migrants, some of whom are children. Migration tends to be defined as an adult activity, thus underplaying how migration affects–and is undertaken by–children.