Reimagining Human Mobility in a Post-Covid World

When the first reports of a serious respiratory disease started to hit the media a year ago, it took some time before we – humanity – realised what a serious impact this phenomenon would have on our lives.

Information  and misinformation were the prominent factors in those early days. Was this COVID-19 virus, as we came to call it, really a serious disease? Was it going to spread around the world? How were we meant to react and prepare?

Due to the connected nature of our world, news about Covid spread even more rapidly than the disease itself. Then it gained footholds in Asia, Europe and then North America. We became used to staying in, to applauding the health services, to the appalling sight of military trucks line up to receive coffins.

And in the background, as they often are, were the world’s migrants, its mobile workforce.

There are over one billion migrants in the world, and more than 270 million of them have moved across international borders.

In the region served by IOM’s Vienna Regional Office there are more than 30 million migrants, who have used migratory routes ancient and new. They move along the old Silk Road from the Chinese border, thorough Central Asia and into Russia and beyond, across the Caspian and the Black Sea, filling jobs in old, manual industries like agriculture and fishing, to modern careers in tech, finance and petrochemicals.

They leave the formerly closed Soviet states and their satellites, or stay within them, on new migration corridors from Ukraine to Poland, Moldova to Romania, Georgia to the Balkans, often taking the jobs that citizens do not want. The dangerous jobs, the dirty jobs and – as we have seen more and more during the Covid era – the vital jobs, as doctors, nurses, carers, couriers, shop assistants.

No phenomenon has been as much shaped and affected by humanity’s reaction to Covid as migration. Simply put, humans are the main vector for the transmission of the virus, so the mobility aspects of our response had to be factored in from day one.

In Eastern Europe and Central Asia we had a welter of questions to pose and to answer all at once. The COVID-19 virus was ethereal, a shapeshifter. Just when we thought we knew something about it, the rules changed.

We needed to look not only at the health aspects, though they were the most evident. How could we protect communities? How would people make journeys home? Could they be tested and kept virus-free on the trains, planes and boats that they would take home? What would happen to them when they returned? Would mass movements place strains on the already over-crowded, impoverished receiving communities? How would these communities cope without the billions of dollars generated and remitted by their family members overseas?

Remittances have been credited in helping to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the past decade, empowering women with a greater role in financial decision-making, and improving health and education among some of the poorer and most vulnerable segments of societies. Lower- and middle-income countries received over USD 550 billion in international remittances in 2019.

Were we about to see a rollback in all those gains?

And what about the vulnerable who could not get home? Would they become ever more marginalised? Would stranded migrants face  increased vulnerability to violence, exploitation, and abuse, discrimination and xenophobia, loss of employment, inability to send remittances to families, homelessness, limited support and lack of access to life-saving services including health care? Would they become more prone to risky behaviour and the associated health issues, both physical and mental?

These questions barely scratch the surface of what IOM, our members states, and the migrants and communities we serve have had to contend with over this strangest of years. We have all had to get used to the new way of living and working, behind a computer screen or a plastic screen, with ubiquitous masks that will be the zeitgeist, defining every photo taken in 2020.

In this region we have the largest population of refugees and migrants in any one country (Turkey), we have conflict (Ukraine, and latterly Nagorno-Karabakh), we have continued movements towards the European Union on migrant routes that begin in the heart of Asia. We have a wide range of government types, ruling over a  heterogenous mix of faiths, bloodlines, and cultures,  some of which trace their origins back to ancient empires, and whose behaviour and alliances – and migration choices – are predicated on those ancient bonds.

Even before Covid, migration in this region was diverse, expansive and essential. The changing climate, largely caused by human activity, has seen new drivers of and motives for migration. As we begin our unpredictable recovery form the shock of Covid, great respect and care must be given to the lands, lakes, forests and fields of this huge swathe of the planet, spanning eleven time zones.

First and foremost, we will be emphasizing that there can be no recovery unless it is a comprehensive, all-embracing recovery. This means that migrants have to be put at the heart of vaccination and care plans. We urgently need a vibrant migration dynamic to restart our shattered economies, and to revert to prosperity and the drive for an equitable, sustainable world.

On the eve of International Migrants Day there is no greater inspiration with which to conclude than the words of UN Secretary General António Guterres:

“We have seen the emergence of anti-migrant narratives stoking xenophobia and stigma towards the very people whose contributions have been so valuable.  We see an opportunity now to reimagine human mobility, to build more inclusive and resilient societies, where well-managed migration harnesses the expertise and drive of migrants to reignite economies at home and abroad.”