The global Sydney thesis and the migration thesis, two important dimensions of the impacts of contemporary globalisation, have been developing in parallel. In this article, we argue that the two theses are intrinsically linked. Sydney’s rise as a global city is closely associated with its growing migration. The central question is how we should approach migration in the new context of global Sydney, and how we should articulate their relationships. To address this question, we construct an integrative framework linking global Sydney and migration, and build a set of indexes to measure global competitiveness, global migration, and global mobility across the Greater Sydney region. The findings reveal that global competitiveness – the defining capacity of global Sydney – has very weak association with global migration that measures the stock of foreign born population, but has very strong association with global mobility that measures the people movement in recent years. These findings call for a redefinition of migration to incorporate people movement to better capture the interplay between global Sydney and migration.