Abstract Earlier work has shown that movement, which forms the backbone of Minimalist syntax, belongs in the subregular class of TSL-2 dependencies over trees. The central idea is that movement, albeit unbounded, boils down to local mother-daughter dependencies on a specific substructure called a tree tier. This reveals interesting parallels between syntax and phonology, but it also looks very different from the standard view of movement. One may wonder, then, whether the TSL-2 characterization is linguistically natural. I argue that this is indeed the case because TSL-2 furnishes a unified analysis of a variety of phenomena: multiple wh-movement, expletive constructions, the that-trace effect and the anti-that-trace effect, islands, and wh-agreement. In addition, TSL-2 explains the absence of many logically feasible yet unattested phenomena. Far from a mere mathematical curiosity, TSL-2 is a conceptually pleasing and empirically fertile characterization of movement.