Editorial: COVID-19 and Migration

In 2020, nearly 86 million cases of COVID-19 and more than 1.8 million deaths were recorded. Immediately after the coronavirus spread on a global scale, the world's economies suffered a severe blow.

According to the World Bank, the global economy was expected to shrink by 5.2 percent by the end of 2020. More than 20 million people lost their jobs in the United States alone, where unemployment reached 14.7 percent in April, the highest level since the Great Depression. In December 2020, the United Nations forecast that the loss of jobs and income threatens to push one billion people - almost one eighth of the world's population - into extreme poverty, eroding a decade of progress in poverty reduction. There are reports of discrimination and xenophobia against people of Asian descent, refugees, and other groups mistakenly perceived as more contagious and therefore hindering efforts to control the disease, according to the UN. The pandemic has strained governments at all levels and has obstructed the work of international agencies.

As is well known, human mobility is sensitive to conflict and insecurity. One of the major threats of the COVID-19 pandemic stems from the fact that it is a source of human insecurity across several domains. Clearly, the most obvious health risk is death; the virus also brings many other risks, including the risk of infection and illness. Added to health insecurity are aggravated social inequalities, emphasizing related health insecurities since not all countries, regions, or places have adequate access to health services, providers, and medical care. These health and social inequalities are a concern at the national level and among state actors. We need to study the role that health and social insecurity may play as determinants in some people's mobility. It is likely that some of the more restrictive measures adopted provisionally may become "normal" and tend to intensify even further. On the other hand, there is an urgent need to examine the positive public policies devised during the pandemic with a view to adapting them when societies emerge from the worst of the crisis. From some experiences in Europe and in Latin America and the Caribbean, one good practice is the timely and flexible regularization of migrants in irregular migration status, thus avoiding disparities in treatment regarding vaccines (when available), among other important measures that must have universal scope. The migrant population that is not properly documented may not want to make itself visible, hindering its inclusion, to the detriment of good health for everyone.

Bridget Wooding

Director of OBMICA