MPI Evaluates Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Mobility and Border Management, and Draws Lessons for Future Public-Health Crises

WASHINGTON, DC — Travel restrictions have become integral tools within the global public-health crisis response playbook, but governments have failed to internalize the lessons on mobility and border management from the COVID-19 pandemic. In face of waning political interest in COVID-19, new research from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) Task Force on Mobility and Borders highlights the need for a fuller postmortem, ahead of the next public-health crisis. Already, it is clear that better coordination among governments and the proactive use of risk analysis frameworks will be essential the next time the world confronts such a crisis, the task force’s final issue brief out today makes clear.

The more than 100,000 government regulations on cross-border mobility imposed in the first year of the pandemic had catastrophic impacts on the global economy and caused far-reaching human harms, from migrants stranded abroad to families separated across borders and restricted access to refugee protection, MPI analysts Meghan Benton and Lawrence Huang write in Lessons from COVID-19: Managing Borders in the Next Global Public-Health Crisis.

While mobility restrictions and health requirements such as testing and vaccination served some public-health benefits, they were poorly implemented and ill-coordinated in the initial phases, undermining their effectiveness. And then they were maintained beyond evidence of their impact.

Though the world has moved on from the pandemic, it has yet to fully reckon with the unprecedented shutdown of the global mobility system or absorb lessons for future public-health crises. Indeed, a pandemic treaty set to be discussed at the World Health Assembly in May has not focused on mobility at all.

“Regrettably, there is vanishingly little political momentum to build up a pandemic-prepared global mobility system. COVID-19’s declining political salience has constrained opportunities for a robust postmortem on what worked and what did not about the pandemic response,” the analysts write. “The first steps toward a more resilient global architecture on borders and health must be taken today, before the COVID-19 pandemic falls even further into the policy rear view mirror.”

The issue brief highlights lessons for managing major public-health events in an era of mass mobility, drawing on more than three years of research under MPI’s Task Force on Mobility and Borders. It outlines four broad recommendations to guide pandemic and mobility management during the next public-health crisis.

Policymakers should ensure their actions are:

• Clear. Public-health advice within travel and migration should be well-communicated, predictable and based on transparent decision-making and metrics.
• Equitable. Governments should mitigate the burdens that health and travel measures place on vulnerable groups and ensure that vaccination or other health requirements do not exclude them from entry.
• Streamlined. Travel measures should be used sparingly, for short periods. Border restrictions, if used, should be time-bound and expire by default if there is not evidence that they serve a purpose.
• Prepared. Ahead of future public-health crises, governments should build systems that build on COVID-19 digital and institutional infrastructure, including by evaluating digital tools developed during the pandemic that could be maintained as “dormant but prepared.”

The issue brief is accompanied by four case studies that examine the impacts of COVID-19 on migration in different regions, each offering in-depth analysis of regional trends and policy developments. The Asia Pacific region saw the most extreme mobility shutdown, with tight travel restrictions staying in place for years. Despite strong regional cooperation pre-pandemic, Europe struggled to maintain migration within and from outside the region and coordination on travel measures proved difficult to animate. Returns of migrants working in the Middle East and North Africa were large-scale and unprecedented. And in South America, border restrictions and economic crisis hit the millions of displaced Venezuelans hard, exacerbating the precarity of those in irregular status or informal work and complicating the region’s regularization processes.

For all MPI analysis, data and commentary on the pandemic, visit: www.migrationpolicy.org/topics/coronavirus.

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