There is growing enthusiasm in academic and policy circles for the positive role that international migrants can play in the development of their home countries and communities. Supranational development organisations, national governments, and other institutions have scrambled to assess the linkages between ‘migration and development’ and to implement new policies and programs to more effectively ‘capture’ transnational remittances in order promote greater development outcomes. This international ‘migration and development’ (MAD) paradigm nevertheless draws heavily on older development models, grounded in modernisation theory, which promoted rapid internal rural‐to‐urban migration. Yet, these connections are rarely acknowledged or analysed within official policy discourses; rather, this MAD nexus is regularly depicted as a new paradigm, one that exists without historical or ideological context. This paper traces out the conceptual connections between past and contemporary linkages of MAD theory. I argue that relinking internal and international migrations literature in development reveals the ways in which modernisation theories that rest on problematic contrasts between modernity/tradition and development/backwardness are unconsciously replicated within current policy discourses. I argue that a return to a close interrogation of the concept of development – as defined by migrant actors themselves – has the potential to both bridge the divide within migration studies and to productively critique migration and development policy discourses in ways that do not elide their historical emergence and political effects. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.