Mapping Global Human Mobility in an Increasingly Complex World

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[00:00:00.03] - Andrew Selee

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good the middle of the night, wherever you happen to be. I'm Andrew Selee. I'm the president of the Migration Policy Institute. I'm very pleased to welcome you to the IOM Migration Policy Institute meeting on webinar on mapping global human mobility in increasingly complex world. This is a joint effort between IOM and MPI. We are launching a report we've done together called the State of Global Mobility in the Aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic. And it is available on the websites of both IOM and MPI. I encourage you to take a look at it. It really is a great report. I'm not one of the authors, so I get to say that, but it really is an outstanding report. I think it'll give you a lot of insight into the way that global mobility trends are being shaped. Taking advantage of IOM's extraordinary wealth of knowledge on global mobility created through the DTM surveys, the Displacement Tracking Mechanism, which are done throughout the world, we were able to work together to get a sense of how mobility patterns are changing since the COVID-19 pandemic. We had started really during the pandemic looking at how mobility had been shut down and the ways it was being reshaped during the time that governments were imposing controls on their borders.

 

But we decided to continue looking at this after COVID-19. It was really quite surprising to see how many patterns have been changing around the world in quite dramatic ways. Since the crisis, since the pandemic. What we find is that there are significantly new patterns of mobility emerging across the world. We document a set of cases that I think you'll find particularly interesting where these changes are really marked. I'll let the panelists explain some of the details on this and the specific results, but I think you'll find this report really captures a set of trends, some of which you know already and some of which you perhaps will find. Will find surprising and all of which really put themselves out there as needing policy responses and needing responses from stakeholders around the world. We have a really extraordinary panel today. I'm not going to introduce each of them other than through their titles. They're all well known. But let me just say that they're all extraordinary in their own fields and in their own work. We will start in a moment with Ugochi Daniels, the Deputy Director General of Operations of the International Organization for Migration.

Great to have you with us here today, Ugo. Meghan Benton, who is the Director of the International Program at MPI and co-author of the report. Koko Warner, who is the Director of Global Data Institute at IOM. And Luisa Feline Freire, Associate Professor of Political Science at the Universidad del Pacífico in Peru and an MPI Nonresident Fellow. We will have a question and answer period at the end after their presentations. It will not be in vivo. It will be actually, if you will be able to type in questions into the text box that you have there. There's a special Q&A box. It's marked Q&A where you can type your questions and we'll try and gather questions and answer them from the panelists as a group. You can also send questions to [email protected]. We are— if anyone has any trouble at all during the webinar, please feel free to email us at [email protected], and we will try and get you reconnected. Usually doesn't happen. And we will be sending a copy of the recording a little bit later today or tomorrow to everyone who signed up for this webinar. We have almost 1,000— well, over 1,000 people actually signed up for this webinar.

We know not everyone We'll make it in the end, but we will make sure that all of you, all of you that are on here right now, as well as those that aren't able to join, will get a copy actually of the recording so that you have a record of this. And with this, it gives me enormous pleasure to turn this over to the Deputy Director General of IOM, Ugo Daniels. So Ugo, go ahead. Looking forward to your remarks.

[00:03:59.08] - Ugochi Daniels

Thank you so much, Andrew. I'm super excited to be here. As you said, it's a great report. So good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to everyone joining from all different parts of the world, whatever whatever time zone you're in. I must start off by thanking MPI for hosting this webinar and to MPI and my IOM colleagues who were critical to the launch of this research paper on the state of global mobility in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. I also want to express deep appreciation to everyone who supported the really thoughtful feedback data consolidation, data analysis, and research assistance, as well as our amazing DTM teams across the globe that collected and synthesized flow monitoring and travel restrictions data that was used in this research. And this paper is the result of a really great collaboration between MPI and IOM. It's the third report in a three-part series that analyzed how global human mobility has changed during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, using data to understand the forces that are changing the world. Together, our data and analysis shape how governments and stakeholders consider the lessons learned in order to raise an important and central question.

How can policymakers create policies that unlock the full potential of migration and the complex realities the pandemic revealed. And there's not a meeting that I have with representatives of government, senior-level, senior official consultations with member states where this issue does not come up. And I think it's because, I mean, obviously it's because we've witnessed within a really short amount of time Many regular migration pathways were suspended as the COVID-19 pandemic rolled out across the globe in 2020. And as we see in the report, the number of travel restrictions and measures around the globe peaked at around 110,000 in total. The report therefore highlights that irregular mobility occurs because regular pathways do not exist. And this absence of regular mobility options can place migrants in precarious, dangerous situations. And we see this very unfortunately, very tragically in the headlines every single day. But this study also shows through analysis of migrant surveys worldwide and through case studies that migration is a fundamental part of growth and development. In all parts of the world. And when it's not possible, growth and development are impacted with global effects. Migration, as we know, is a global force and an age-old way that families and communities manage uncertainties and risks.

 

I say this as the Deputy Director-General for Operations at IOM, But I also say this as somebody who, when I was very young, my family fled a very brutal civil war in my home country of Nigeria. And I'm sure many of you online have your own migration stories. And we know that people move towards opportunity and away from threats, be they in the form of floods and droughts, economic or conflict-related. It's part of the fabric of life for most of us. It has shaped human civilization, and for some iconic groups like pastoralists and cross-border traders, it is the context of their life on a day-to-day basis. Migration also acts as an accelerator of economic growth, sustainable development, peacebuilding, and innovation. And what we see in the report is that about 65% of migrants who were surveyed across 9 contexts said they were moving to better their economic livelihoods. And we know at the same time that every additional 1% of immigration could boost GDP growth in destination countries by 2%. The absence of migration in labor markets that relied heavily on this source of labor was a factor in concerns about domestic food production during the pandemic, an issue in staffing jobs essential for society during periods of lockdown, and a source of post-COVID inflation.

There's a clear and very pressing need to protect people on the move. This goes back to my comments about the tragic headlines we see every day and why it's so important to continue to drive solutions to displacement, and facilitate regular pathways to migration. We must ensure no one is left behind. The trends in this report really show the need for collaborative management of migration and highlight that well-managed migration can be a form of resilience in the midst of frequent global shocks. It's time for a new strategic approach and for renewed energy to deliver on the promise of facilitating safe, orderly, and regular migration. As I always say, migration has shaped human civilization, and it is going to continue to shape human civilization. And therefore, it's up to us to ensure that it is positive and that the outcomes work for the countries of origin, the countries of destination, and most important of all, for the migrants themselves. So for IOM and our commitment to saving lives, delivering these solutions and facilitating regular pathways, we've outlined approaches in our recently launched strategic plan. That support a better understanding of the complex migration landscape. This includes investing in data and analysis and research that can inform evidence-based policies.

It includes prioritizing increasing the availability and use of mobility data alongside data on capabilities, vulnerabilities, and needs of people on the move, as well as the communities that host them. It also includes actively participating in capacity building and knowledge initiatives, collaborating with governments, civil society, and other stakeholders to enhance our understanding of the multidimensional facets of migration. And that's a very long and fancy way to say we're all in it together, and we really need an all hands on deck approach if we are going to fully unleash all that migration has to offer, at the same time mitigating and hopefully ending the situations that force people just seeking opportunity to put their hands in the life of a trafficker or a smuggler. So IOM's data and analysis is a key part of IOM's unique offer of community-level solutions that address the specific challenges faced by migrants. And I have to thank MPI and IOM colleagues again for their instrumental work that's brought us all here today for the launch of the paper. And the subsequent speakers on this amazing panel are going to delve into the findings of the research on the state of global mobility in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

[00:12:28.17] - Ugochi Daniels

So I look forward to hearing more from you and hearing your questions on this webinar. So Andrew, am I handing back to you?

[00:12:38.03] - Andrew Selee

I think so. Thank you, Deputy Director General. That was a really thoughtful but also really compelling way to start this conversation. Thank you. That was great. I think gets us focused on why this matters and how it fits in the broader context. Incredibly helpful. Let me turn over to Meghan Benton, who is joining us either from France or somewhere in France or somewhere in Switzerland, you can tell us, and is the director of MPI's International Program and the lead author on the report as well. So Meghan, over to you.

[00:13:08.12] - Meghan Benton

Currently in France. Europe has taken a bit of a cold, cold turn, but it's nice to be here. And thank you so much, Andrew, for your opening remarks and also DDG Daniels for that very inspiring opening intervention. Also, just to echo my thanks to the DTM team, the wider IOM and MPI teams who are really stellar, and this has been a really great collaboration. So I'm really excited about this report. I'm sorry I say that like it's a surprise, but I think it tells a really interesting story about the shifting nature of human mobility across the world, the volume, composition, distance of movements, the terms under which people move. And I should backtrack a bit and tell you that we started this report keen to get an answer to the fairly seemingly basic question of whether the unprecedented border closures and travel restrictions that DDG daniels spoke about had a lasting impact on global migration. And I think what's really striking is how quickly and robustly travel and migration recovered, basically the moment we could travel again. But writing and researching this, and I hope for many of you reading this, really drove home to me the incredible preeminence of mobility to modern human life, whether that's adapting to extreme weather conditions or pursuing trade along border communities, seeking to provide for your family, finding somewhere to make your business work, fleeing war or managing risk, as Ugo said.

 

What we say in the report is the ability to move is at the heart of what it means to be human. I think the other important point to make is that what drives people to move is often a mix of factors that can't be neatly categorized into distinct boxes. If you think about a Ukrainian family splitting their lives between Berlin and Kyiv, and the mother is supporting her family by working remotely for a a Kyiv-based company, and the kids are registered both for Ukrainian remote school and for local schools in Germany. Or if you think about a tribe of nomadic herders in East Africa who are moving themselves and their livestock across growing distances to find water and food in the face of droughts and failed crops. Or if you think about a Venezuelan youth after years of living on temporary visas in Chile decides to move to the United States but on a work visa. So we often lump all of those cases under the banner of displacement, but that fails to capture the agency of the people involved, the diverse reasons why people move, and the kind of transnational forms of economic activity and belonging that are emerging in a mobile digital world.

 

And the other thing the report does and the DTM data does is it illuminates the scale and character of movements that often float below the radar. So in major destination countries, we often paint irregular movements as a political crisis, but in some places they're just part of the central tapestry of economies and society. So in countries with porous land borders in Africa, Asia, Latin America, people pass through unofficial border crossings just to visit family or do trade on a daily basis. And the reason for this is often quite practical. So in Nepal and India, for instance, People just use informal crossings because it's quicker and cheaper. During the pandemic, we had semi-formal crossing points, for instance, in South America pop up because the formal checkpoints were closed. But most migration research doesn't, doesn't show that. They use administrative data, which is based on legal migration or unauthorized border crossings and asylum claims. That's why this flow monitoring data is fascinating. It gives us insight into the true scale of regular and irregular movement. But also who is moving and why they move. So if I could just use the rest of my time, I wanted to preview some of the regional and thematic findings of the report.

 

And I should say that because of a lack of standardization of data collection practices in the different regions, this is in part because of the extreme difficulties of collecting data in quite fragile contexts, which is one of the reasons why this data is has historically been a little underused. Because of that, we, we focused on some case studies on the major disruptors and drivers of movement through looking at thematic trends in migration corridors. So we look at the Gulf, we look at resurging intra-regional mobility in Southern Africa, we look at Latin America shifting status not just as a source of immigrants but as a destination for migrants. We look at the rebound in irregular migration to Europe. We also talk about growing climate shock in East Africa and Pakistan. I hope that Koko will speak a little more about that. And we talk about the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan and the impact that had on movements, and of course, the Russian invasion in Ukraine. Because at MPI, we talk all the time about Europe and North America, and I know that Feline will speak about the Americas, I wanted to just highlight two of the lesser discussed stories that we pull out.

 

The first one on the Gulf. As is well known, the pandemic triggered this huge exodus of migrant workers from Gulf Cooperation Council countries. But these countries saw really surprisingly rapid recovery. Of labor migration in the last 2 years. This was quite surprising for some people who had predicted that the pandemic might mean a weakening of the often criticized kafala system of migrant worker sponsorship, especially because there was all this scrutiny of labor standards around the 2022 World Cup in Qatar and the 2020 Expo in Dubai. Labor reforms are underway. They've been fairly incremental, but I don't know that the pandemic was a sort of watershed there. And we've seen a really robust recovery of migrants coming from South and Southeast Asia, but increasingly people coming from East Africa, many of whom are quite vulnerable. They include women, unaccompanied children fleeing conflict and violence and drought and food insecurity. But really, it's a preeminent destination and a fast-changing one. And then another interesting case study that struck me was just the way that Southern Africa is becoming a microcosm for a fast-evolving mobile world. So in the region, migrant workers are really critical to agriculture, to manufacturing, to mining, especially in South Africa.

But it's interesting that this is increasingly met by intra-regional short-term circular movement rather than necessarily permanent labor migration. And it's also layered on top of displacement crises in the region, including in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There's also rising public anxieties and restrictive policies in some receiving countries such as South Africa. So in a way, South Africa, Southern Africa encapsulates broader global trends and the sort of major themes of the report that we've been trying to trying to highlight. But perhaps the major story, and one where I think we would want to discuss more, and Ugo also highlighted this in her comments, is the way that the pandemic marked a kind of turning point for irregular migration. So it's very hard, I think, to draw a causal link. A lot happened all at once, but amid squeezed regular pathways, some migrants were diverted to more dangerous irregular routes, and it's clear that irregular migration began to stretch along longer distances. You have migrants from origins as distant as China now transiting the Darién Gap. It's hard to say that COVID caused that, but it was part of the kind of complex soup that led to this, I think, watershed moment and does point to the need for regular pathways and a more managed Global Migration System that the DDG spoke about.

But I think most of all, it points to the need for a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the changing face of human mobility. So I hope that I've piqued your interest enough to look into the report and look forward to discussing further today.

[00:21:55.17] - Andrew Selee

Thank you, Meghan. I really appreciate it. I have to say, I got a sneak peek at this when you were writing it and was really excited and have loved it. So I think it is— and I got a chance to read it when it was done also. But it really is— I think it shows some exciting and some worrying things as well. I mean, let's not, you know, cover that some of these are not are not positive trends, some of them are, and some of it's just we need to start with understanding the way mobility is shifting, right? And some of the things, like for example, circular might, you know, we assume we always talk about migration as people going from point A to point B, but they're often, it's point A to point B to point C back to point A. And you know, there's a lot of real shifts going on that we don't fully grasp yet. And Koko, with that, it's a great pleasure to turn over to Koko Warner and to hear your views on this in such an integral part of, of putting this report together. So thank you, Koko.

[00:22:45.18] - Koko Warner

Wonderful, thank you. And thanks to Meghan and MPI. It is such a pleasure for IOM to get the chance to collaborate. I think we're longtime collaborators and you heard Meghan as well as DDG daniels or, or Ugochi Daniels talk about something called the displacement tracking matrix. And just as a background, For those of you who don't know the Displacement Tracking Matrix, or DTM, it's one of the largest extensive ingestors of primary data about people who are moving, especially in situations of displacement, but also often informal forms of migration. And it's my privilege to be director of the Global Data Institute and DTM as part of that. So a big shout out to the teams that make this kind of data investigation possible. It's thrilling and really insightful. And Andrew, I think one of the things that struck me about the report was some of the insights that we're getting on climate change impacts. So if any of you follow climate change impacts, you'll know that last year and the year before, and the year before have subsequently broke historical temperature records. Um, there's a lot to be said about climate change impacts, but last year for recorded temperatures in many parts of the world was far, far above historical averages.

 

And only time will tell, but it looks according to the best available science that we're rapidly approaching a global average temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius. And for those of you who follow climate policy, climate science, or who are just living in your communities, you already feel the impacts. So we know that climate change impacts are with us. And I think one of the things that struck me about this report is we have just experienced and are trying to make sense of what a global phenomenon means for us, not only in terms of migration and displacement, other kinds of population movements, but what's actually mean for us to experience as a global population of human beings, something that, that changes how we work, where we live. And migration is, is part of that story. And see, there's a lot of lessons looking back that this report contains that are going to help us understand better what we need to do now to deal with climate change impacts that are upon us and to understand how climate change impacts are affecting population movements and how they may be likely to unfold in the near term, medium term, and long term.

[00:25:52.04] - Andrew Selee

Thank you, Koko. That was great. We really appreciate, we really appreciate the opportunity to work with your team on this as well. And just the wealth of information that the DTMs have. I mean, Let me put in a plug also for the whole DTM process and how important it is to be able to understand how people move around the world. And you have a real wealth of detail at a local level that is impossible to get otherwise, actually, and qualitative as well as quantitative, which really matters. With that, let me turn to Feline Freier, who, from the Universidad del Pacífico, who will probably speak broadly, but I know will also speak specifically about the Western Hemisphere. But, Feline, over to you.

[00:26:32.10] - Luisa Feline Freier

Thank you so much, Andrew. I will zoom in a little bit on the Latin American experience and will also draw from a report that we wrote for MPI with my colleagues Andrea Kvietok and Leon Lucar, focusing on the experience of human mobility in South America specifically, before, during, and after the pandemic. So if we think about South America, it's really important to— well, first of all, why does South America matter? Maybe I should start there. I think, Meghan, you mentioned this very often. We still focus too much on human mobility in or towards the Global North, and especially when we think about the impacts of global events such as the COVID pandemic, we really have to understand contexts in the Global South.. And we have to understand contexts in the Global South with extensive land borders that cannot, cannot be controlled by governments, even though they wish to do so. And this is the background we really have to keep in mind when we think about the impact of not only the pandemic, but especially restrictive measures during the pandemic on medium and long-term mobility patterns, but especially the conditions in which that mobility takes place.

 

So in the case of South America, very briefly, if we think about the scenario pre-COVID-19, both intra-regional, so migration within the region and migration from outside the region, including the Caribbean, but even origin countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East had significantly increased.

And when I say a significant increase, I'm referring to an increase of more than threefold from 1919 to 2019, from 4 to over 14 million migrants, both from within and outside the region. In South America alone, there were a major— 4 main corridors, and I want to mention all 4 of them. On the one hand side, regional migration from neighboring countries to Argentina. Both Paraguayans, so intra-regional, but also Haitians, so Caribbean migration to Brazil, migration from Peruvians and Argentinians towards Chile. So again, intracontinental, intra-regional, and also Colombian and Ecuadorian migration to Venezuela. And what's important to keep in mind that even before the pandemic, Most of this migration was voluntary or characterized by labor movements, but there were already significant flows of forcibly displaced people as well. Maybe ironically, those from Colombia to Venezuela, for example. And then what we saw in the years before the pandemic was this huge increase of Venezuelan displacement. Displacement. And I'm sometimes so surprised when I talk to audiences outside the Western Hemisphere or outside Latin America even, that there's still so little awareness for the scale of Venezuelan displacement. So let me quickly highlight this. We have now close to officially, no, and I'll come back to this, officially close to 8 million Venezuelans living or being displaced outside of Venezuela with the vast majority, over 6.5 million within the region.

 

And this again is a context that very often is not taken into consideration and that mirrors other, other contexts of, of human mobility in the Global South. So what we saw before the pandemic was this huge increase both of intra-regional and extra-regional human mobility. Both voluntary and forced. We already saw an increase of irregular movements, and maybe we'll come back to this in the discussion later. Original reactions to Venezuelans were very welcoming, and there were at least ad hoc and temporary programs to give them regular status, but that had already decreased before the pandemic hit. And now what happened with, with the pandemic and with restrictions that were very severe in South America as in other regions in the Global South, So we're not only talking very strict border closures, we're talking about the militarization. So the actual deployment of soldiers along various land borders in South America. Again, we're talking about borders that have an extension of thousands of kilometers or miles. To give you one example, between Argentina and Chile, we have a border of 5,300 kilometers. That of course cannot be monitored and controlled by the military. But I'm just mentioning this because it shows the severeness of the restrictions that were also the longest compared to other regions in the world.

And really what we found mirrors what the MPI-IOM report has found, that the effect of these restrictions were perhaps a very short-term, and I'm talking a number of weeks, maybe couple of months, reduction in flows. People were scared, people didn't really know what was going on, but then it was impossible to stay put, right? Because many of these flows represent a forced decision, the need to migrate, especially in the case of Venezuela. So in the case, sticking with Venezuela, in the case of Venezuela, even during the pandemic, numbers of Venezuelans outside of Venezuela continue to increase. Legal pathways were closed. So unfortunately, I would say the one big effect of the pandemic, at least now I think we can already say in the medium term, has been this huge increase of irregular routes and the empowerment of criminal groups in South America. And this is something we know from discussions with NGOs. We know from discussions with migrants themselves, but we have obviously very little data, right, on exactly what is going on, exactly how these patterns have shifted and what the scale of the empowerment, unfortunately, of criminal groups that engage not only in migrant smuggling but also in other forms of international crime.

Lastly, in order to not only talk about flows but also the conditions of flows, what we saw during the pandemic in South America were that very often migrants and refugees were not included in any kind of social programs that governments did implement in order to lower the burden of these, these the kind of mobility restrictions that were in place not only internationally, but also within countries, which led to a very disproportionate effect of the loss of income without any kind of social assistance for migrants and refugees in the region. And in consequence to a huge reduction of remittances, which again affected very negatively family members back home, especially in countries with very dire economic and social conditions such as Venezuela. So Andrew, maybe I'll end here for now, but I'm really looking forward to the discussion. And I think South America really is an example of how severe and how serious these short and medium-term impacts of the pandemic have been both on mobility patterns, but especially the conditions, the irregularity and the empowerment of criminal groups. And I'm not an expert of, on, on other regions in the Global South as much as in the case of South America, but I'm afraid of the fact that this really mirrors situations across the Global South. Thank you.

[00:34:58.14] - Andrew Selee

Thank you, Feline. That's great. And thank you to all the panelists for being so on point because this gives us some time to go back to questions from those that are with us today. I'm going to try and gather them. We've gotten quite a number of questions, and so I'm going to do a first round on some things that I think are sort of framing questions that help us, and we'll come back to some of the more specific questions. And maybe we'll go to Koko first and then to Meghan, then to Feline on this. One is a clarification question on how do we know in the data who are visitors versus migrants and how did we tease those out? So we're not just looking at sort of tourism flows or other things. One is, I think, on how migration is— are there ways we could use migration data better to understand how climate is affecting mobility? I know it's something that IOM has been very involved in. My colleagues Lawrence Huang, who is not speaking today but is on the line actually helping with the questions, has been doing a lot of work on our side with Meghan on this as well.

So I think an important question to address. How can we better leverage migration data for policymaking? I think something we all care about here. And how can technology be leveraged to make legal pathways more efficient and more accessible? Something we care deeply about as well. So Koko, let me turn over to you on those, whatever you want to answer out of those, and then Meghan, then Feline.

[[FOR THE Q&A PORTION OF THE TRANSCRIPT, SPEAKERS ARE NOT IDENTIFIED BY NAME. PLEASE SEE THE RECORDING TO IDENTIFY SPEAKERS.]]

[00:36:25.18] - Speaker 4

Oh, thank you so much. And some of these questions, just for time purposes and also to have the chance to interact with you as an audience, we will be really happy to take offline. And many of these questions like how DTM collects its data, its methodologies, our surveys, et cetera, that would be— we'd just love to continue having those conversations with all of you, all of you, many hundreds of people in this, in this webinar. I'm going to particularly address, address two. So if we know that we are unfortunately rapidly approaching a 1.5-degree temperature threshold, if we humbly acknowledge the deep uncertainties in Earth systems, such as Antarctica and ocean circulation, which drives our weather systems, um, and if we also humbly acknowledge that human behavior is also deeply dynamic and hard to model, there's a lot that we can do with the data that we have. We're using math and statistics coupled with our field colleagues who are out there with people. And there are a couple of things that I would say with all of these things coming together with what we've learned from the paper about how a global phenomenon like the pandemic both interrupts formal migration but doesn't necessarily, necessarily stop population movement.

[00:38:04.20] - Speaker 4

We move towards opportunity and away from risk. We do know today that we're very, very busy with elections this year, with conflict that's also driving internal displacement and other movements, with demographic change, while climate change is slowly but quickly rolling across the planet. We know that data is transforming how we understand the role that migration plays in moving towards opportunity and away from risk. Migration is one of a number of forces that distribute humans and resources and opportunity and risk across our planet. So here are 2 or 3 things that we're doing right now together with many of you, dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of you on this webinar to help inform policy. So first of all, we're taking a foresight approach through modeling to understand the spatial and temporal distribution of climate change impacts. And that's done in partnership with a lot of you who are in the climate science space. And I can put, you know, a little resource that you can go to. Some of you may know what we have on our migration data portal so that you can understand spatially and temporally where we think these hotspots are, but it's not good enough.

[00:39:35.09] - Speaker 4

In the— I come out of the climate policy world from UNFCCC, and I've observed for several years that a lot of us in this space have kind of gone for a big number in our work. So there have been modeling approaches, and it feels like every new approach has created a next new big number. And interestingly, creating big numbers often does draw a lot of attention to the topic of climate change, migration, displacement. But that argument is really about the big numbers, is often a little bit about drawing attention to we need to actually avoid anthropogenic climate change and acknowledging how important it is that we change our energy systems and our way of producing food and our stewardship of the world's forests and lands, we haven't avoided anthropogenic climate change. And we need to go from big numbers to numbers that matter because now is the time for action. And that is exactly what we need to do next to inform policy and action. So the next two points are as much about an invitation to all of you, especially If we have data scientists, statisticians, mathematicians, modelers, field experts, um, this is really an example of what MPI is already doing together with us, partnering up.

[00:41:08.21] - Speaker 4

We need to get insights about how economics and social factors and environmental factors combine, um, and affect population movements. We need to undo some of the current ways we think about population distribution. And that matters because it matters for municipal bond markets. Some parts of countries are depopulating, populations are moving away from some places. Some parts of countries and regions are becoming more and more populated, and they happen to be extremely sensitive to climate change impacts, coastal areas, low-lying deltas, low-lying islands. Those are examples. So there's tremendous asset exposure, tremendous population exposure. You have women, children that might have different types of exposures and vulnerabilities or susceptibilities than working-age male populations. And data is helping us understand what we need to understand to address those needs. And I could go on and on. What the results are, well, just this fall and a little bit beyond this fall, our teams are going to be bringing out a new generation of modeling that takes climate change impacts and produces deeper insights at about a 10 by 10 kilometer scale to help partner up with all of you that can take these insights to those who are doing the action, to those who are help making action possible, to our many donors and supporters and friends, and to those who are shaping the policies, because climate change is now here, and now is the time for action.

[00:43:01.09] - Speaker 4

And data joined up with policy insights like our wonderful MPI partners is the thing that's really needed now. And so this is— we're shifting gears, understanding what COVID meant for migration, what it meant for all of us, is providing those kinds of insights that are going to truly take us into very soon this next generation of work together.

[00:43:24.07] - Speaker 1

Thank you. Meghan, over to you.

[00:43:26.01] - Speaker 3

On the question about how we know whether people— whether we include tourists in the people moving, my understanding is that the DTM data, the point is it doesn't split people up into what visa category they're using or what type of traveler they are because we're explicitly not using administrative data. I also already mentioned the sort of real mixed motivations for movement, including the kind of the overlap of economic and other factors. Ugo already talked about the 65% of migrants who said they were moving to better their economic livelihoods, but that can also be combined with other factors. And I would point you to the report to see some really interesting data on that. But it is really focused on high migrant volume corridors, so wouldn't capture people who are largely moving for tourism. It might capture people who are moving for trade on a short-term basis. And that is in the report. But perhaps I can make a broader point on that because I think it puts its finger on a really interesting point when, as we work in migration, which is that we at MPI increasingly shifted through the course of the pandemic and in recent years to talking about mobility rather than about migration.

[00:44:39.05] - Speaker 3

And I think the pandemic showed that there was a real there was a real inequality at points in terms of who could move and who couldn't because of the different travel restrictions in place. So who could afford testing or who had early access to vaccines or who could absorb the risk that their journeys might be disrupted. But there was also a kind of equalizing effect. Many, many people were affected by family separation, the inability to attend weddings and funerals. And categorizing that as tourism is not— it doesn't really capture the way that, you know, we are all living transatlantic, transnational lives, and not all of that movement is discretionary, even if it's visiting. So I think it is important to capture the different array of types of mobility. On technology, yes, Millions of, millions of things that it will affect. And I think we're just at the beginning of seeing how technology will transform the kind of global migration system as well as asylum systems. I mean, just on asylum, the kind of gold standard of fast, fair, and final asylum systems, technology will really facilitate that. But there's also a lot of experimentation going on right now, including around the the Safe Mobility Offices, how can you provide people with counseling and information that can prevent them from undertaking dangerous journeys?

[00:46:09.17] - Speaker 3

And ideally, there's a technology component there which would prevent people from having to move to congested transit, transit areas. There's opportunities from remote work and training and upskilling in displacement situations that I think are very exciting, and also opportunities for creating economies of scale and well-functioning infrastructure for referring displaced populations to complementary pathways, meaning labor, education, family unification, routes that also have a sort of humanitarian goal. So technology is very exciting, and I think that we should be thinking about what the 10-year landscape looks like for the global migration system and how things could work more efficiently and also facilitate well-functioning kind of regional and global labor markets that have efficient, more efficient matching, both of people with job opportunities, upskilling opportunities, but also with sponsors or people who are willing to provide support for them through complementary pathways. And then on data, Koko, you're so inspiring. I'm really excited about all of this modeling stuff. But perhaps just to throw in a kind of more basic need additionally, which I think we should be thinking about, which is just about the need to have more up-to-date real-time data, which helps just doing the sort of nuts and bolts of multi-year planning in public services and policy.

[00:47:45.03] - Speaker 3

So like I said, administrative data is often very out of date. We used to hear all the time about the challenges with like free movement within the EU, which is the world's most well-oiled free mobility system, but they're not being able to plan for population change and local authority budgets being set on last year's data. That's the stuff that creates real challenges and bottlenecks and blockages. And we know, I think, that this is what triggers public anxiety. People don't care about numbers per se. They don't necessarily— they're not necessarily anti-migration if it's well managed. They overwhelmingly care about disorder and their own experience of bottlenecks and scarce resources in public services. And so all of those kind of knock-on effects from conflict and climate shocks overlaid with these existing kind of basic problems about how we're not good at navigating population fluctuations. I just think that data is at the heart of solving these problems and it's not rocket science. And I'm so excited about All the stuff that you are talking about, but also just the opportunity to have more up-to-date data, I think would be really valuable for the policy community.

[00:48:59.09] - Speaker 1

Thank you, Meghan. That's great. I'm gonna go to Feline, but there are two Latin America-specific questions. We have less than 10 minutes left, so we're gonna have to be— there's still a whole bunch of questions that keep pouring in here. So I'll go back to Koko and Meghan, but let me go also with the two Latin America Caribbean questions. One is the Caribbean is very understudied. How do we correct that? You know, a lot of nation-states, a lot of mobility in the Caribbean, and yet very understudied. And I should recommend, by the way, my colleague Valerie Lecarte's study of migration policies in the Caribbean, which was an attempt to try and remedy that, but it remains the case that there's sort of a lack of data. And secondly, Feline, there's a question about criminal groups in South America and how that has influenced migration patterns and the growth of some of the criminal networks. That have, have spread out across the continent. So over to you.

[00:49:50.23] - Speaker 5

Thank you so much. I'll try to be very brief. Just an add-on to Koko and Meghan. I couldn't agree more. And just from the South American perspective, what we did in our report, I mean, we take the administrative data. We— and I wanted to say that before because it's the official numbers, but we could— we should rather use those as a proxy for trends than using them as the actual number of people on the move in the region. And that is a huge problem. Exactly what you said, Meghan, because they're only counted on the aggregate, like, national level, but we don't really have any good, reliable data on the local level. But that's where people arrive. That's where people need public services. And that's one of the huge challenges for effective migration management in Latin America. Regarding both migrants and refugees. In terms of data from the Caribbean, I couldn't agree more. And I think I would even be autocritical here in the sense that there is this disconnect of academic scholarship between Latin America and the Caribbean. I think on the one hand side, because of language issues. So there's the Spanish-speaking community and then much of the Caribbean is is English speaking.

[00:51:06.11] - Speaker 5

Well, often we do include the Dominican Republic, but then with Haiti and French, it already gets difficult for, for, for some people. So I think we have to make efforts to collaborate more, both on a policy but also on an academic level. And one positive example is the initiative by the Canadian IDRC, who are funding 12 research chairs on forced displacement in the Global South. We hold one of them at the, at the UP in Lima, but there is one in the Dominican Republic, another one in Mexico. And at least on this very micro level, we have started to collaborate more. And one of the things we really teased out and have stressed is the lack of collaboration. And I would also say the lack of studies on the Caribbean. And that's hugely important. I mean, Haiti is an obvious point in case right now, but I think also more studies are needed and comparative work with the English-speaking Caribbean islands as well. To answer the question on how COVID— and I think again, my co-speakers have also expressed this warning. Of course, it's sometimes correlation isn't causation. We have to be careful by actually stating that all of this has been caused by, by Corona, and it's probably hard to prove.

[00:52:32.13] - Speaker 5

But I think what we're seeing, and we really need more studies, is that the very, very severe restrictive policies in the region have led to a shift, right, of movements towards irregularity, towards more dangerous routes. And criminal actors were present. They were present either to facilitate that movement against fees. They also take money just to let people cross. This happens especially between Venezuela and Colombia, but also in other borders in South America. And then they use these situations of vulnerability to recruit migrants and refugees, to recruit them for illegal mining, which is, again, I don't have the data, but from anecdotal evidence, from conversations with NGOs, with migrants and refugees themselves, we you know this is going on. So recruitment for illegal mining, also for drug trafficking, sometimes voluntary and sometimes forced recruitment, right? And there we see these interlinking and overlapping of different criminal activities. We might not be that concerned, some of us more, some of us less, when we think about migrant smuggling, right? But the problem is that very often the same groups engage in migrant smuggling and also in these other kind of more criminal, criminal activities that also pose a greater risk for the human security of migrants and refugees themselves.

[00:54:01.19] - Speaker 5

And I would love to go on. I have to stop here, but I think maybe one thing I didn't mention and highlight enough yet— Meghan, you brought it up— it's not only contained within the South American region, we are seeing these patterns and increasing transmigration. So especially in the case of Venezuelans, because of failed socioeconomic integration, which has a lot to do with COVID-19 and the restrictions during COVID-19. And we see these onward flows towards Central and North America very often, either with the help or in contact and in dangerous contact with criminal groups. So I'll leave it here, but we know it's happening. We need to know more. We need to do more research. We need to somehow get the data to, to, to prove this is happening because it's so relevant to develop policies to, to, to halt this. Thanks, Andrew.

[00:54:59.19] - Speaker 1

Great. Thank you, Feline. Okay, we have 3 minutes left. So this is the lightning round. I am going to give you just a couple questions and answer what you can in 1 minute each. Global Compact on Migration, what does this group recommend as follow-up? Southern Africa, Meghan, I think this is for you. Was the movement towards regional and circular migration driven by government policy or more organic? There's a question about the, why is there no discussion of refugees? I would say it is mentioned in the report, but we do other work and whether we work with UNHCR, IOM works with UNHCR a lot, we do a lot also. But in this report, we were looking at mobility trends. There is some talk about government responses it does talk about refugee responses, but also talks about other non-refugee responses to displacement, actually. So let me just answer that one quickly. One for Koko specifically about how do we change negative stereotypes about migrants? And finally, for Meghan, displacement risk tools. Are there good tools that help us think, not look just at displacement happening now, but what the risks are in the future? So, or Koko, either one can answer that.

[00:56:07.10] - Speaker 1

So Koko, you first, 1 minute. And then Meghan, you got 1 minute.

[00:56:11.13] - Speaker 4

We, we must meet again often. Love the question about negative stereotypes. COVID, for those of you who are economists, there are a series of really important new economics papers on the Phillips curve. The one thing COVID showed us with regular migration is that when you interrupt the regular labor supply, you can get inflationary impacts. It doesn't matter how high wages go. If you don't have a supply of labor, you don't have enough people to do the work. Um, and that ranges from the doctors and the nurses to the people working in the fields harvesting food that we all eat. And I think that recognition is helping a lot of us understand much better and much, much more at a granular level where our lives are impacted, whether it's the people that help us take care of our families, our children, our aging parents. Migrants really play an absolutely fundamental role in the way our societies work, be that our societies, our economies. It's all a fabric. And the more that we can illuminate that, Through the stories, like in this wonderful report that our wonderful colleagues— I like it so much, I'll keep saying it— whether it's through stories, whether it's through data and visualizations, this is a story we really need to keep telling, the global data story of population movements.

[00:57:48.06] - Speaker 4

And I— because they connect with our lived experience, data has a role to play with— to play in that. And it's of course joined up with many other communities, policy in the operational community, think tanks like MPI and others. And I'll leave it at that. Thank you.

[00:58:08.11] - Speaker 1

Thank you, Koko. Meghan.

[00:58:12.11] - Speaker 3

That was many, many great questions. On displacement risk, yeah, there's an evolving field on displacement risk and IOM is very much a leader on this., but we still need better granularity, making sure the data is accessible and interoperable and better systems to use the data that we have. And I don't want to end with the Southern Africa question, but I'm happy to follow up directly with that. But I think the kind of core question underneath that is whether the governments, by creating regular pathways, can reduce incentives for irregular movement. And this is the question that we are getting asked all the time by governments. And I do think there's a real need for more research on this. We do, we increasingly have a little bit of research around the edges. But the fundamental question of what does a regular, a well-functioning system of mass mobility look like and how large do the pathways have to be? How do they target the right populations who are on the move for different reasons? This is where all the action is at right now. And I think that this conversation today has shown the way that data can kind of illuminate this question, but also the kind of long list of research and data follow-up that we have as partners on this important topic.

[00:59:31.08] - Speaker 1

Thank you. Thank you, everyone who joined us today. We really appreciate you being with us. If we didn't fully answer your questions, we will try and get back to you. Koko, Feline, Meghan, thank you. Um, Ugochi Daniels, thank you for being with us. If you can convey that, Koko. And we really appreciate all you being part of this. And, and look, what we are hoping to do with this report is not provide all the solutions, we don't have them, but yes, provide some of the trend lines that are really important out there and, and that require that we begin thinking of new solutions and how we create options for for safe, um, and regular pathways that people can move in. So thank you very much. Take care.