Human geographers, and collaborators in cognate disciplines, have taken the lead in critiquing a wave of optimistic thinking about the relationship between migration and development that has emerged over the past two decades. This paper reviews and synthesizes recent human geographical and related critiques, arguing that they constitute a ‘new migration-and-development pessimism’, the main contentions of which are: (1) that the new optimism is not really new; (2) that it is partially driven by hidden political and economic agendas; and (3) that it is distorted by simplification and exaggeration.