Conclusion

Human migration and mobility have rebounded remarkably since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when most of humanity stopped moving all at once. However, the sharp rate of rebound masks a massive underlying shift: almost three years after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, much of the world is still less mobile than it was before the pandemic, a fact with profound medium- to long-term implications for populations, societies and economies around the world.

The emergency phase of the pandemic has passed, but a “long tail” of infections and public health responses continues to disrupt migration and mobility. The harshest restrictions have receded, but they have left behind a more complex and restrictive migration policy landscape, one with new risk profiles for different categories of movers, to the frustration of those seeking a return to the hypermobile 2019 world.

Against this background, migration and mobility flows have rebounded, but not to pre-pandemic levels. International airline passenger numbers remain stubbornly below their 2019 baselines, especially in Europe, and in Asia and the Pacific, where they are 25 to 49 per cent lower. Domestic air travel is a more mixed picture: it was not affected as badly as international air travel and it has recovered more quickly, but people in different world regions have had very different experiences of pandemic restrictions on domestic flights. Community mobility, fascinatingly, has rebounded vigorously in lower income countries, but sluggishly in higher income ones.

Through these changes to migration and mobility, the pandemic has catalysed or accelerated some major long-term social transformations. For example, in migrant origin countries, the pandemic has highlighted the ongoing importance of remittances sent by migrant workers to their families and communities in the homeland. Remittances declined far less during the worst of the pandemic than even the most optimistic experts predicted, and they rebounded far more quickly, suggesting once again that such flows are not only large in size but also disproportionally important because they are countercyclical: when other economic indicators went down during the pandemic, remittances stayed firm and soon rose.

In destination countries, persistently lower levels of migration and mobility are also having profoundly transformative effects. For instance, they are forcing employers to adapt to less flexible labour markets than they had become accustomed to over the previous decades. Firms are being forced to reduce their dependence on distant labour sources and invest more into “digital outsourcing” (in which human labour is performed remotely at a lower cost) and automation (in which the need for human labour is reduced or cut entirely from certain tasks).

It may seem counter-intuitive to predict lower levels of demand for migrant labour while unemployment remains at historically low levels, and employers across the developed world are lobbying governments to increase immigration. However, the current tight labour market in rich countries is not the result of increasing demand for immigration, but is rather the result of drastically falling supply of migrant workers, and this is forcing firms to make decisions that will lock in levels of demand that, while much higher than in mid-2020 while COVID-19 was raging, will probably be significantly lower than pre-pandemic levels.