Beginning in January 2020, governments around the world turned to migration management tools—such as border closures, travel restrictions, and bars on asylum—initially in hopes of keeping COVID-19 from entering their countries, and later as part of a wider suite of mobility restrictions to contain the spread. These fast-moving policy changes, some short term, others leaving a lasting mark on immigration systems, are being analyzed by MPI and MPI Europe researchers.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected nearly every aspect of education, and it is expected that English Learners (ELs) will suffer disproportionate impacts. In this webcast, panelists discuss how weaknesses in existing EL teacher education and professional development policies have played into schools’ uneven response to the pandemic. They also offer lessons for future reform.
As COVID-19 chilled global mobility, harmed economies, and sparked border closures and travel bans around the world, the pandemic has had an effect on the shadow migration world. In this episode of our Moving Beyond Pandemic podcast, we speak with Matt Herbert, an expert in irregular migration and human smuggling, about how the public-health crisis has scrambled the decision-making calculus for would-be migrants, pushing many into more dangerous routes. We also examine the business models of human smugglers.
The COVID-19 pandemic poses a range of (im)mobility challenges that the international community has few tools to address. This policy brief examines the valuable guidance offered by the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration on short-term emergency response and the longer-term reopening of international migration. It also considers how the pandemic is affecting the relationship between migration and development.
Austria’s Vienna airport was an early adopter for in-airport COVID-19 tests, with results turned around within a few hours, sparing those with medical certificates from a mandatory 14-day quarantine. Can this serve as a model for restarting business travel and tourism? In this episode of our Moving Beyond Pandemic podcast, we talk to Vienna airport official Peter Kleemann to learn more.
Australia has worked to develop a “biosecure” border, using hard travel lockdowns, internal borders, and quarantine to stem spread of the COVID-19 virus. Is it working? In this episode of our Moving Beyond Pandemic podcast, host Meghan Benton talks to Brendan Dowling of the Australian Department of Home Affairs.
When he was elected prime minister in 2019, Kyriakos Mitsotakis promised what he called “strict but fair” reforms to secure Greece's borders and speed up transfers of asylum seekers crowding Aegean islands. Yet domestic and geopolitical tensions continued to roil the islands, later joined by a global pandemic, culminating in a fire that destroyed most of Lesvos's Moria refugee camp. This article examines Greece's efforts to strike a delicate balance on migration in a complex era.
Since COVID-19 hit cities across Europe, many have struggled with how to sustain support for migrant inclusion in a time of social-distancing orders and likely budget cuts. This report explores how municipalities and their partners used social innovation to meet the challenges of the 2015–16 spike in arrivals of asylum seekers and migrants, and how those experiences can help localities weather the pandemic and put communities at the center of recovery efforts.
The 2020–21 academic year is underway, but many U.S. schools, students, and families are still reeling from the rocky transition to remote learning that occurred months earlier, after the COVID-19 pandemic hit. For English Learners and students in immigrant families, many of the challenges are magnified. This policy brief examines how schools’ pandemic response is affecting these students and offers recommendations to help schools and districts support them in this period of uncertainty.
