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COVID-19 put an unprecedented brake on global mobility this year, but it did not prevent people from being displaced from their homes or asylum seekers and migrants from attempting dangerous journeys across borders and seas in search of safety and opportunities. economic.
At the beginning of the year, the number of people forcibly displaced by conflict, persecution and human rights violations was around 79.5 million. By June, it had risen to more than 80 million, despite movement restrictions and UN calls for a global ceasefire during the pandemic.
If anything, the coronavirus only exacerbated the factors that push people to migrate, while making camps for refugees and internally displaced persons more dangerous, increasing risks for people on the move, and giving governments an excuse to implement hard-line immigration policies, often legally dubious.
There were some exceptions. Spurred by economic and medical need, some national and local governments took steps to include everyone, regardless of legal status, in their responses to the pandemic.
In particular, Portugal temporarily extended residency rights to immigrants with pending applications and undocumented individuals within its borders, paving the way for them to access social services and health care, and Italy adopted an ambitious, albeit flawed, program. of regularization for undocumented immigrants who work in certain sectors. of the economy.
But overall, the pandemic accelerated trends toward more restrictive immigration policies and a disregard for the human rights of asylum seekers and migrants in 2020.
In the Mediterranean, only around 90,000 asylum seekers and migrants arrived in Europe this year, compared to 123,000 last year and more than a million in 2015. More than 950 died while attempting the trip, although the number is likely actual is significantly higher.
Italy and Malta mentioned the virus when they closed their ports to asylum seekers and migrants in April, and social distancing measures, travel restrictions and government obstruction have hampered search and rescue efforts by NGOs. Without search and rescue boats and dedicated aircraft to monitor the sea, it is impossible to know how many shipwrecks have actually occurred.
The pandemic accelerated trends toward more restrictive immigration policies and a disregard for the human rights of asylum seekers and migrants in 2020.
The EU also continued to support the Libyan Coast Guard, which intercepted more than 10,000 people and dragged them back to detention centers where thousands disappeared from the official radar in a shadowy system of extortion and abuse.
Following a politically induced refugee crisis on the Greece-Turkey border in late February, human rights groups documented a sharp rise in refusals made by Greek authorities at the country’s land and sea borders, including cases of people abandoned in floating tents in the Aegean Sea and registered asylum seekers were detained inside Greek territory and expelled to Turkey.
In early September, the burning of the Moria refugee camp on the island of Lesbos dramatically illustrated the shortcomings of the EU migration policy, as years of inability to address the humanitarian needs of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in Greece collided with the coronavirus to create an unsustainable situation. The EU’s New Deal on Migration and Asylum, a package of proposals to guide how EU countries tackle the issue in the coming years, was launched shortly after the fires, but seems unlikely to reduce suffering at borders. of Europe.
In the United States, the administration of outgoing President Donald Trump, which has been hostile to refugees, asylum-seekers, and migrants since taking office in January 2017, effectively removed access to asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border to through a public health order on the coronavirus. allow anyone who enters the country irregularly to be expelled immediately without being able to apply for international protection. More than 315,000 people were expelled under the order between March and mid-December.
Years of inability to address the humanitarian needs of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in Greece collided with the coronavirus to create an unsustainable situation.
In Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, the start of the coronavirus pandemic overlapped with a months-long internet and telecommunications ban imposed on the roughly 900,000 Rohingya refugees living in the region’s camps, helping fuel the spread of false rumors and panic about the virus.
Hundreds of refugees leaving Bangladesh were trapped in the sea, some for months, as neighboring countries closed their borders.
On land, the pandemic increased tensions between Rohingya refugees and their Bangladeshi hosts, with refugees stigmatized as virus spreaders and frustration directed at aid groups perceived as privileged refugees over local communities. In early December, Bangladeshi authorities began relocating 1,600 Rohingya to a remote island in the Bay of Bengal, despite protests by refugees and human rights groups.
In Latin America, even before the coronavirus, xenophobia was growing towards some five million Venezuelans who have fled to other countries in the region since 2015 to escape their country’s economic collapse. The pandemic contributed to hardening attitudes towards Venezuelans and, in general, deepened the humanitarian crisis in the region.
The economic impact of the blockades forced more than 135,000 Venezuelans to return home, although many appeared to be leaving again in late 2020, even as escalating violence and conflict along the Colombia-Venezuela border made those trips more difficult. more and more dangerous. The drop in remittances, a consequence of the pandemic that is being experienced around the world, also added to the economic difficulties faced by approximately two million Venezuelan households (about 35 percent of all households) that depend on payments. of relatives abroad.
In Iran, an economic downturn fueled by US sanctions was already pushing Afghans to return home before the coronavirus reached the country. In February, Iran was one of the first countries outside of China to be hit hard by an outbreak, forcing thousands more Afghans to re-enter Afghanistan and importing the country’s first cases. As of mid-December, a record 817,000 undocumented Afghans had returned home this year from Iran, according to the UN migration agency IOM. Even as the country struggled to cope with escalating infections and violence from the Taliban, the EU sought ways to more easily deport rejected Afghan asylum-seekers to their home country.
By the end of the year, the Ethiopian government’s military offensive in the northern region of Tigray triggered a new displacement crisis, with more than 50,000 people crossing into neighboring Sudan. While increasing economic difficulties and a combination of other factors led to the reactivation of the dangerous Atlantic sea route from West Africa to the Spanish Canary Islands, the numbers increased from less than 2,700 in 2019 to more than 21,400 in 2020.
In 2021, look for our next coverage on the impact of deaths in the Mediterranean on families left in West Africa, how the pandemic has affected access to asylum in the EU, and why opening safe and legal pathways is more complicated than it seems. For now, these are the highlights of TNH’s 2020 coverage:
(Compiled by Eric Reidy, TNH Migration General Editor).
Venezuelan migrants face growing xenophobia in Latin America
Some working-class communities in neighboring countries are showing signs of tension as competition for jobs and social services increases.
