Introduction

The impact of COVID-19 on human populations¹ cannot be overstated. The pandemic caused 12 per cent of worldwide deaths in 2020/2021.² In Western Europe, the 2020 mortality increase was the highest since the Second World War, and in Eastern Europe it was the highest since the break-up of the Soviet Union.³ COVID-19 vaccines were able to prevent approximately 19.8 million excess deaths.⁴ But this did not prevent COVID-19 from altering overall life expectancy in many countries: life expectancy at birth declined for males in the United States of America by 2.2 years, in Lithuania by 1.7 years, and comparable declines were recorded in 11 countries for males and 8 countries for females.⁵ Even though the worst of the pandemic is over in most places, successive waves of new variants continue to disrupt everyday life (see Figure 1 and Appendix A). 

This chapter focuses on the transformative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on global migration and mobility, providing an update to the chapter on COVID-19 in the previous World Migration Report.⁶  The chapter asks: How have travel and movement restrictions changed since the last report? How have migration and mobility patterns evolved across the same period? What are the most important long-term implications of these trends? The chapter reveals that human migration and mobility have rebounded considerably since the nadir of the pandemic in mid‑2020, but remain below 2019 levels for most of the world. This prolonged reduction, together with increased variation in overall levels of human migration and mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic, has had a transformative impact. 

Source: See Appendix A for details.