US President George W Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will convene this week to address this issue, which is linking and affecting their countries.
All over the world, millions of people are on the move from country to country, defying dangerous seas and violence-fraught paths either as refugees or to find a more prosperous life elsewhere. In the Americas, most of the migrants are drawn to the US with its riches and porous borders.
The three leaders hope to find ways to address the issue together, at the same time that the US Senate is considering sweeping changes to US immigration laws.
According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, the number of refugees and migrants in the Americas has risen to 25 million last year, up 4 million since 2000. Most are from Mexico, the Caribbean and Colombia, but also from Brazil, Argentina and Central America.
This has led to a drain of the population in many countries. For example, 9.4 per cent of Mexicans do not live in their native country, 8.7 per cent of Cubans have left the island and the number of El Salvadorans not living in their country is 14.5 per cent.
Costa Rican President Abel Pacheco, for example, Tuesday expressed how hopeless it was to stop the illegal movement of people. His own country has many immigrants from Nicaragua. 'Hunger has no passport,' he said, referring to the poverty and hunger that drives people to move.
Most of the emigrants have gone to the US, but others have also sought new homes in Europe, Canada and Japan. An estimated 1.2 million Latin American immigrants live in Spain.
Fox wants immigration reform in the US, and changes to the existing laws to benefit his citizens - which make up the largest share of legal and illegal immigrants to the US. They send home hundreds of millions of dollars in remittances to families every year.
Fox praised a guest worker programme under consideration in Congress that would allow 400,000 foreign workers annually to be in the US as guest workers.
'I think it's good that we are moving ahead,' Fox said Monday evening, after a Senate panel in Washington approved the programme. 'It's the result of five years of work.'
Fox and Bush were both elected in 2000, when Bush rushed to visit Fox and promise closer cooperation with the southern neighbour. But Bush has been distracted by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, causing hard feelings south of the border.
Mexico itself is beset by an illegal immigrant problem as many pass through its large territory from Central and South America to the US border, riding the tops of freight trains and hitching rides where they can.
But how much the emerging legislation in US Congress will address the problem of the 11 million undocumented workers in the US is debatable.
Competing legislation to the guest worker programme by conservative Republicans, passed by the House of Representatives in December, calls for 1,000 kilometres of the 3,000-kilometre-long border to be fortified with high walls, and for criminalization of community and church groups that help illegal immigrants.
That law provoked outrage in Mexico - an outrage similar to the one that moved hundreds of thousands of US demonstrators into the streets over the past days to put pressure on Congress.
Mexico, Canada and the United States have been joined in the North American Free Trade Agreement for more than a decade, but one of the lasting and seemingly unresolvable problems on the table in Cancun is how to merge the idea of free trade with borders closed to human movement.
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