What’s Next for Global Migration? Gazing Into the COVID-19 Crystal Ball

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CHAPTERS

[00:00:00]: Ten COVID migration questions and setup 

[00:03:03]: Unanswered migration questions in late 2020 

[00:04:53]: Why mobility will not snap back in 2021 

[00:11:17]: Nativism risks and social impacts   

[00:14:22]: Tech investment and AI accelerate trends   

[00:17:05]: Remote work reshapes high-skill migration   

[00:21:45]: Travel bubbles: prospects and challenges   

[00:25:39]: Is this the end of migration's age?  

TRANSCRIPT 

[00:00:05.280] 

Welcome to Moving Beyond Pandemic, the Migration Policy Institute's podcast about travel, migration and mobility during COVID-19. I'm Meghan Benton, I'm the research director for MPI's International Work and also for MPI Europe, our sister organization. At MPI, we've spent a lot of this year desperately trying to keep up and understand a rapidly evolving world of migration and mobility. But with the news that there might be one or more viable vaccines on the horizon, it seemed like a good time to step back and consider what 2021 might hold in store for the global movement of people. So from how a vaccine might restart global tourism to issues about the supply and demand of labor migration, I was very excited to do a bit of COVID crystal ball gazing with Alan Gamlen, who is Associate Professor of Human Geography at Monash University in Melbourne and he's an expert on diasporas and transnationalism. But most recently he's been working on the implications of COVID for migration and mobility and is writing a book on this topic. And in addition to his academic work, he's been an advisor to various international organizations and governments and he's a great systems thinker.

[00:01:15.580] 

I think, as you'll hear from our interview and back in June he wrote this highly prescient paper that sets out 10 predictions, or at least they're framed as questions, but they're kind of predictions, including will COVID travel bubbles become economic regions, Will immobility reshape cities? Will commuter travel decline? And the big one, will countries need less labor migration? So I wanted to chat to him to see what progress there's been on these topics. And spoiler alert, he said that the answer to most of his questions was yes. Hi Alan, thanks so much for joining me.

[00:01:56.760] 

Thanks for having me, Meghan.

[00:01:58.680] 

How are things? How's Melbourne?

[00:02:00.920] 

Great. Really good to be coming out of lockdown and into summer. Unfortunately we're thinking of you guys there

[00:02:07.400] 

going into winter. So I've wanted to chat to you for a while because you wrote this great paper back in June, I think, about how this might be the end of the age of migration and you set out 10 really provocative questions on how COVID's kind of reshaping migration and mobility, on whether countries will need less labor migration, on migrant decision-making, on international student migration, on travel bubbles. And what I wanted to do with our discussion today is force you to answer some of your own questions and make some predictions. So perhaps we could begin. I mean, we're sort of almost closing out 2020 what do you think now are the most pressing and unanswered questions about the future of migration?

[00:03:03.330] 

It's a good question. I still think that these 10 questions are pretty important. I would say that there needs to be some detail obviously fleshed out in some of those questions. So, for example, you know, questions around migrant decision-making, obviously the calculus is different for different types of migrants. And while we're still in the kind of the emergency stage of the pandemic, with lockdown still closing and opening and closing again, it's difficult to make predictions around things like, well, will there be a sudden surge of forced migration as pressure builds up? So those kinds of questions are still sort of unanswered and I think need fleshing out out of those 10 that I, that I raised in that paper. But I still think that those 10 capture really a lot of the things that we need to know. I also think that probably the answer to quite a few of them is turning out so far to be yes.

[00:04:07.410] 

I mean, perhaps we could just talk a little bit more about decision making, since you mentioned that. So you talked in your paper about how some people might be more risk averse, others might be more desperate. I think one thing that's quite clear now is that there's probably going to be a very uneven economic recovery and public health situation for the foreseeable future. So with news about vaccines on the horizon that potentially could come into play in the beginning of 2021, do you think that you can just kind of turn the tap on and then there'll be a backlog of interest to people who want to move? Or is are we likely to see 2021 look quite similar to 2020?

[00:04:53.960] 

Well, I think there will probably be a little bit of a surge and you know, you can start to turn the tap back on, but it's, it's not going to. You know, it's like when you first do the tap on, there might be a little jet of water and then it settles down to a trickle. And I think that's probably more likely to be the case. I mean, number one is that early 2021 is very optimistic, probably even unrealistic, for mass production of a vaccine to the level where the required number of people will be immune. So we know that one of the horses in the race to produce a vaccine is going to come through in the coming months. That will almost certainly happen by the first quarter of 2021. But the mass production of that vaccine on a global scale, to the extent where 40 to 60, I think, is the threshold needed for herd immunity, 40 to 60% of the population to be immunized. It's not something like smallpox where you need a really high level of immunization, but there still needs to be a substantial portion of the global population to be covered in order for the vaccine to be effective.

[00:06:10.320] 

And that requires a whole supply chain of materials for the, for vaccine production, which is probably not going to be ready for quite some time after that. So I saw an interview between Bill Gates and the editor of the Economist, projecting more like, well, a lot of it will be done by the end of 2021 with a bit lagging over into 2022. So that rather than early 2021 being the time frame for getting a vaccine out to everybody and opening up the borders, it's really more like 2022. And by that time quite a few things will have changed. People will have made plans around lower level, lower levels of migration mobility. Quite a few, you know, sort of long term contractual arrangements for businesses and policies will be locked in on assumptions of lower migration mobility. So long story short, I don't think we will see a snapback to, you know, December 2019 levels of migration mobility next year. And I think this is much more likely to be a multi year trough with some spikes of kind of unpredictable migration like the repatriations that we've seen in recent months. And similarly, you know, when circumstances allow maybe surges of people escaping their predicaments which have become worse during the pandemic and so forth.

[00:07:42.270] 

But I think these will be spikes in a overall downward trend for a few years. So sort of a jagged downward trending line migration mobility for a few years.

[00:07:56.260] 

I think that's right. I think one big question is how labor demand will be affected by various developments on the horizon. So if you think about a lot of destination countries, they've had some labor shortages in sectors like agriculture, but a lot of sectors that are heavy employers of immigrants, like service sector tourism, restaurants, have been totally decimated. What do you think the labor markets look like for the first half of 2021 and labor migration? I guess.

[00:08:37.080] 

Yeah, good question. Well, the paper predicted that there would be an overall decline in demand for labor migration. And I think that's the case. I think we'll continue to see an overall reduction in demand for labor migration, but an increase in demand for certain types of labor mobility. So let me explain what I mean there we've seen demand for labor migration decrease because unemployment's at an historical high and the amount of the decrease varies by sector and skill level. Of course, migrants tend to be overrepresented at the low and the high ends of the skill spectrum because they do the jobs that native workers won't do or can't do. And in general the lower skilled jobs have been harder hit because the high skilled ones can be done remotely. So there's this overall, you know, reduction in the number of jobs, increase in the size of the, the labor market pool from which employers can recruit. And then at the same time political pressure to prioritize native workers over migrant workers, which overall is downward pressure on demand for labor migration. But countervailing pressure is that the pandemic has also disrupted seasonal labor mobility, for example, creating large agricultural labor shortages obviously in sectors where the, where the mobility is the product, like tourism, you know, huge increases for demand simply because not enough of it's happening to keep, you know, to keep the lights on.

[00:10:23.580] 

So again, my, my prediction is continued. Overall reduction in demand for labor migration for the next, I would say one to three years. We could safely say that's the case. But there'll be spikes of demand in particular sectors which just heavily depend on migrant labor or temporary migrant labor or mobility. You know, they'll immediately need to recoup some of the recruitment they haven't been able to do because of lockdowns.

[00:10:53.170] 

I guess one thing it depends on is how successful countries are in their efforts to think creatively about alternatives. So obviously there's a lot of interest in tapping into out of work residents and even thinking about how you do things like regularize unauthorized immigrants and tap into other pools of underused labor that are already in the country.

[00:11:17.310] 

That's right. And this, you know, it's not a matter of reinventing the wheel. We've had, you know, amnesty as a sort of de facto migration policy in significant parts of the world for many decades. You know, just sort of allow, tolerate irregular migration and regularize people every few years as a way of managing migration. And you know, similarly we've seen periods where there's been concerted attempts to, you know, to prioritize natives where we've seen nativism grow. So it's not going to be a case of reinventing the wheel. When countries are looking for ways of doing this. I think that they, it would be surprisingly easy for them to, to reduce the focus on migration as a stimulator of economic growth, that they'll have a bunch of tools to do that. Whether that's the right thing to do or not is a whole other question. I think it could potentially be quite traumatic and lead to all sorts of both economically traumatic but also socially and politically traumatic because it could lead to all sorts of, and already is leading to all sorts of anti immigrant hate crime and you know, just a reduction in the overall position of minorities in societies that are trying to keep the border a little more closed to migrants.

[00:12:50.770] 

One thing that a lot of people have been talking about is the other way that you deal with labor shortages, which is through investments in the productivity of your workforce. So technology and training and there's obviously a lot of chat about whether the pandemic might catalyze automation and digitization and AI. I think one thing that's always struck me is how whenever-pre pandemic days-whenever you saw estimates of how many jobs might be lost to automation, it was sort of presented as if it was a fixed thing. But it's actually very, very dynamic. And it will be interesting to look and see whether this massive natural experiment that's happening with a lower period of migration, how employers will respond, so they respond to supply and demand. If you have fewer workers, fewer migrant workers in your workforce, then you might decide to automate certain aspects. And there are lots of examples in history, like the closing of the Bracero guest worker program in the U.S. Which is sometimes credited with the rollout of mechanical harvesting. So is this a similar, a similar moment? You know, what does it mean for restaurants as they shift to take out fewer people needed to do in person service elements?

[00:14:17.550] 

These are all, I think really dynamic issues. It's very unclear.

[00:14:22.030] 

Absolutely, absolutely. That's a really excellent point, Meghan. The classical kind of economic theory. Think of Charles Kindleberger, past president of the American Economic Association. His argument that one of the most important developmental factors of migration is that it changes wage levels in countries and higher wages as a stimulus to automation rather than just hiring more workers in order to get productivity, employer goes, those workers are still starting to get expensive and hard to get hold of. I better make some new technology that makes each one of my workers more productive instead of just hiring more workers. So I think that we're absolutely at one of those moments. And in that sense, as in fact is the case in many other areas, the pandemic's proving to be a trend accelerator. You know, we've already seen this, you know, sort of technology has been rapidly growing, increasingly sort of disrupting all aspects of society and becoming innovation has for a long time been the key driver of growth. And the pandemic, through this mechanism that you just pointed out, that making it harder to get workers just adds to that trend of investments in technology.

[00:15:49.360] 

So you know, the high tech sector, it's raining cash in the tech sector now as a result of the pandemic. So, I think we will see all sorts of investments there. One of one set of investments is obviously gonna, is really happening in how do we make remote work more effective and productive to overcome some of the limitations around, you know, informal interaction and culture and team building and so forth. But then there's also just going to be a whole bunch of things like you say, around automation of low-skilled work and you know, even in professional services, where will AI, you know, what will be the role of AI in industries like accounting and medicine and even law and so forth. I think we'll see the pandemic being a, a big trend accelerator there and that again will probably, there'll be a sort of an interaction there that will depress demand for it will be stimulated that those investments in technology by a reduction in labor migration. And on the other hand those new technologies will depress demand for more labor migrations. So I think these are all factors that say probably going through a bit of a trough historically.

[00:17:05.320] 

And there's a lot of really important points there. And a good reminder that this isn't just about the low wage end of the spectrum, but also about as you say, jobs in like accounting and paralegals that might shift overseas because now they can be done remotely. And then as you say, the tech sector might be booming, but it's also thinking differently about the geographical distribution of its workforce. Lots of companies announcing they've gone fully remote either for the next, either for the duration of the pandemic or the next couple of years, or in some cases forever. What do you think? What does this mean for migration and mobility? Does it mean that a lot of companies are no longer going to go through the hoops of bringing in high skilled workers? Does it mean, as you pointed to in your paper, a kind of decline of big cities and the traditional destinations that are losing their edge relative to places with lower house prices? I think there's a possible scenario in which you find kind of mid sized cities seeing this as a moment for economic revival because families and young professionals can move in and they'll need a sort of complimentary immigrant workforce potentially if that becomes a boom.

[00:18:26.200] 

I guess looking a little bit further ahead beyond the immediate future.

[00:18:31.480] 

Well, I think to those two questions I'd say a tentative yes. So on the one hand I think that this will depress high skilled migration to some extent, although that may be more about the supply side than the demand side. It might be less about employers saying we can't be bothered jumping through the hoops and more about high skilled migrants having more choice. So that comes back to the question of migrant decision-making. So we expected in the paper that voluntary migrants would be more risk averse, including high skilled migrants. They'd be more risk averse about migrating while the irregular and forced migrants be more pressured to move as a result of the pandemic. And that's basically panned out as expected. So we've seen all forms of legal migration mobility drop dramatically. Irregular migration seems to have held fairly steady though and we know there's a lot of pressure building up for full migration out of humanitarian hotspots that currently doesn't really have an outlet because of the pandemic. So I think that maybe the supply side might be the, the most affected in terms of high skill. And then in cities, I think yes, we're definitely seeing a shift in the way that cities are organized spatially.

[00:20:00.460] 

I saw some research presented recently by a colleague, Professor James Curry, who's a transport studies scholar and based on a number of different cities which have gone through lockdown and have come out of it, he was predicting essentially a 20% decline post pandemic decline in use of public transport. We've seen that, you know, the froth has been taken right out of the inner city property markets in major cities around the world. There, you know, there's lots of empty apartments, you know, the ones that were kind of marginal in terms of profit for the, for the landlords are now starting to go at fire sale prices. And at the same time we're seeing livability massively increase in some of the suburbs around major cities. You know, as people can work from home particularly there's access to, you know, to amenities like parks and other sort of entertainment and play areas. Those, those suburbs are becoming much more livable and people are moving out enough, as they used to say, to the, to the leafy suburbs and beyond into those second tier cities they say the secondary cities or in Australia we'd call them the regional cities, regional centers.

[00:21:20.130] 

People are moving there because, you know, they might need to only come into work a couple of days a week. It seems likely that that will probably be possible on a long term basis for many people in high skilled work. And so seeing, you know, the property market running hot around major cities in the, in the sort of regional areas around major cities. So I think this will have profound changes in both of those areas, even

[00:21:45.110] 

I found myself longing for the suburbs as you were describing the amenities there. As a, as a lifelong city dweller, they're definitely losing their lure. I wanted to ask you about travel bubbles, particularly since you're in Australia, the, you know, source of the most famous travel bubble. But even the Trans-Tasman bubble has really struggled to get off the ground. You said in your, in your paper that it would be interesting if travel bubbles are set up and essentially come to define economic mobility regions based on public health criteria. Do you still think that's a likely possible scenario?

[00:22:26.040] 

I think of the 10 questions or hypotheses in that paper, that's the one that hasn't really come out as I'd expected. And as, you know, outfits like the Economist Intelligence Unit had predicted. So, you know, the EIU went in with some pretty, pretty strong predictions that companies should be, firms should be preparing for the regionalization of supply chains and that this would be, you know, this could be potentially a long term de globalization event and that, you know, might lead to regionalization. To me, that, yeah, that's a, certainly was an interesting question. Doesn't seem to have happened largely, largely because things are changing so rapidly. So at the time that the travel bubbles were being negotiated between Australia and New Zealand, those countries were getting on top of their first wave infections and then Australia went through a second wave so it couldn't join the travel bubble. In Europe and the UK seem to have seen similar things. And so we've gone. It's been a much more fluid and dynamic set of negotiations which I think actually is one of the things that really need further research is these air bridges and visa free travel arrangements which are negotiated between countries on a sort of a short term base, will let your people in with more or less screening, depending on who you are.

[00:24:00.690] 

And I think that's really a fruitful area of research into how those agreements are being negotiated. What are the determinants? Well, first of all, what are the patterns of those agreements? Is there anything we can generalize about them or is it still too flawed? And secondly, you know, what is it that's driving them? Are they politically negotiated? Are they negotiated on the basis of public health advice? Is it, you know, what is it? What's the basis of these agreements? So to answer your question, that the travel bubbles happening and evolving into economic regions hasn't happened and I now doubt that it will happen to the extent that I thought it might at the time of having that paper. But on the other hand, the other nine questions seem to a bit of

[00:24:45.430] 

a... Yeah, they might just happen more slowly. I mean, I think that when we have a viable vaccine and extremely uneven vaccine access, you might find more countries in the situation that New Zealand was in, which is that it had, you know, sufficiently low cases that it could trace them pretty easily. And if you have neighboring countries that are in broadly the same situation, then at least the public health conditions are there. I don't know. I think that the pandemic has been weird because some things have moved really fast and some things have moved really slowly and that may yet be a prediction that pans out. All right, we're getting close to time, so final question, which is probably a bit unfair because again, it's throwing your own phrasing back at you, but do you think this is the end of the age of migration, as you, as you asked in your paper?

[00:25:39.260] 

Well, you know, as I said in the paper, it's always risky making predictions because, you know, the answer to that question depends on decisions that people haven't made. Great thing about humans is they can change their minds. So, you know, fundamentally we don't know. There are some things we do know, though, quite quickly, quite a few, some of the things we've discussed already now, and that suggests that essentially it really, it's not feasible or realistic for migration to bounce back in a short term. We know that it's also necessary for some firms and governments to lock in arrangements that, you know, that need to be conservative and assume lower levels of migration mobility for a period. And so they will become self-perpetuating in a way. And so I think we're seeing rather than just a short spike downwards for 2020 in migration mobility. We're more like seeing a two to five year trough in migration in a big trough. So if this is the age of migration, doesn't mean that there's never going to be migration again. What we've seen in the, in the past is that migration's gone through these cyclical waves, right?

[00:27:04.150] 

There's been periods of migration boom and periods of migration bust. The last big migration bust globally was around World War II. The pandemic's really kind of event on the same scale as that. And I think that we could see a very significant reduction in overall international migration mobility, you know, for a three to five year period. It might not be as severe as, you know, World War, touch wood. But certainly I think predictions about things bouncing back to normal in a year or two are probably too optimistic and that we should prepare for a structural shift here that may last a considerable period.

[00:27:56.600] 

Thank you so much. It's been really great to talk to you. I've learned so much. Thanks for your time.

[00:28:01.400] 

I feel the same way. It's great to connect. Meghan, thanks very much for having me.

[00:28:07.960] 

So Alan paints a picture of a world with much lower levels of mobility for the next few years at least. But I thought his idea that this period of muted migration will be punctuated by spikes was quite an interesting one. So spikes in repatriation of stranded migrants, of people escaping situations that have worsened under pandemic, spikes in labor migration in particular sectors. This fits with what I've been saying for a while, which is that the process of reopening economies and borders in particular, isn't likely to be linear, but it's more likely to be two steps forward and one step back. And I think even with a vaccine, we're likely to see a lot of fits and starts as different countries recover at different rates and get over the virus at different rates. Another idea of Alan's that really resonated with me is the idea that global migration will become split between those who can afford to pick and choose their destination, or indeed choose not to move, and those who are just driven by desperation. I think on the one hand, this could shake up the global race for talent, have new destinations becoming the leaders.

[00:29:22.260] 

On the other hand, it could mean more irregular movements, more people on the move with unmet protection needs, more people relying on smugglers, more people stuck in extremely precarious displacement situations. If you're interested in reading more of Alan's work, you can find his paper Migration and Mobility After the 2020 Pandemic: the End of an Age on the Compass website. So the University of Oxford Compass website. We at MPI have a ton of resources on COVID and migration at migrationpolicy.org/Coronavirus and while you're there, I'd also point you to a paper from MPI's founder and President Emeritus, Demetrios Papademetriou, which is entitled Managing the Pandemic and Its Aftermath: Economies, Jobs and International Migration in the Age of COVID-19, which is really an excellent paper that you should all read. In coming weeks, we'll be digging into the news on the vaccine race and considering what this means for mobility and borders. We'll also be looking again at the evidence on how and whether border closures can prevent the spread of pandemics. And please stay tuned wherever you find your podcasts. Finally, I'd like to thank my colleagues, Lisa Dixon, Michelle Mittelstadt and Kenia Guerrero for producing this podcast. And the music you heard today was Juno in the Space Maze by Loopop. I'm Meghan Benton.

[00:30:47.480] 

I'll see you next time.