Drawing on the international literature on migration and immigrant associations, mainly in the context of North and South America, but also including several other global immigration contexts, this essay highlights several main questions and issues. It discusses the definition of voluntary associations and the principal impetus for associational activities among immigrant newcomers. Using examples from specific types of organisation (secret societies, credit associations, mutual benefit societies, religious groups, hometown associations, political groups), it examines the factors that shape immigrants’ formal sociability. The paper then addresses the class and gender composition of memberships, compares the associative practices of the mostly European immigrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the mostly Asian, Latin American and African arrivals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and discusses the issue of state involvement. The essay approaches the topic from a global and historical perspective to show how quasi-universal processes on the one hand, and local and temporal specificities on the other, shaped associational practices in a way that transcended the ethno-national traditions and characteristics of particular immigrant groups and host countries.