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When the first reports of a serious respiratory illness hit the media a year ago, it was some time before we, humanity, realized the serious impact this phenomenon would have on our lives. Information and misinformation were prominent factors in those early days. Was this COVID-19 virus, as we came to call it, really a serious illness? Was it going to spread all over the world? How would we react and prepare?
Due to the interconnected nature of our world, news about COVID-19 spread even faster than the disease itself. It got footholds in Asia and Europe, and then North America. We get used to staying home and applauding the health workers, and the ghastly sight of military trucks lining up to receive coffins. At the bottom, as is often the case, were the world’s migrants, its mobile workforce.
There are currently more than one billion migrants in the world,1 and more than 270 million of them have crossed international borders.2 In the area served by the Vienna Regional Office of the International Organization for Migration (IOM)3Spanning Southeast and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, there are more than 32 million international migrants who have used both old and new migration routes.4 They move along the ancient Silk Road from the Chinese border, through Central Asia and into Russia, through the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea and beyond. They take jobs in former manual industries, such as agriculture and fishing, and pursue modern careers in the technology, financial and petrochemical sectors.
They leave the formerly closed Soviet states and their satellites, or stay within them, in new migration corridors stretching from Ukraine to Poland, from Moldova to Romania, from Georgia to the Balkans, often taking jobs that local citizens don’t want. . They fill the dangerous jobs, the dirty jobs, and, as we have seen increasingly during the COVID-19 era, the vital jobs on the front lines, working as doctors, nurses, caregivers, messengers, and shop assistants.
No phenomenon has been as affected by humanity’s reaction to COVID-19 as migration. In short, humans are the main vector of virus transmission, so the mobility aspects of our response had to be taken into account from day one.
In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, we had a large number of questions to ask and answer simultaneously. The virus was ethereal, a shapeshifter. Just when we thought we knew something about it, the rules changed.
We needed to look at the obvious health issues and decide how to protect communities. How would people make trips home? Could they be tested and kept virus-free on trains, planes, buses, and ships? What would happen to them once they got back? Would the mass movements put pressure on the already overpopulated and impoverished host communities? How would these communities cope without the billions of dollars generated and remitted by their relatives abroad?
Renata Held, IOM Regional Director
Remittances have been credited with helping lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the past decade, empowering women with a greater role in financial decision-making, and improving health and education among some of the poorest and most vulnerable segments of society. Low- and middle-income countries received more than $ 550 billion in international remittances in 2019.5 Were we about to see a pullback in all those gains?
And those who could not reach their homes? Would they be increasingly marginalized? Would stranded migrants face increased vulnerability to violence, exploitation, abuse, discrimination and xenophobia? Would they experience job loss, inability to send remittances to families, homelessness, limited support, and lack of access to life-saving services, including healthcare? Would they become more prone to risky behaviors, and thus associated physical and mental health problems?
These questions hardly scratch the surface of what IOM, our Member States, the communities we serve, and migrants themselves have had to grapple with during these strange years. We’ve all had to get used to new ways of living and working, in front of a computer screen or behind a plastic shield, with the ubiquitous masks that will become the spirit of the age, defining every photo taken in 2020.
In our region, we now have the largest refugee and migrant population in any country (Turkey), as well as the conflict in Ukraine and, lately, in Nagorno-Karabakh. We are witnessing continuous movements of people to the European Union along routes that begin in the heart of Asia. A wide variety of governments govern a heterogeneous mix of beliefs, lineages and cultures, some of which have their origins in ancient empires; their behavior and alliances, and their migration options, are often based on those longstanding ties.
Even before the pandemic, migration in this region was diverse, expansive, and essential. The changing climate, largely caused by human activity, has created new drivers and motives for migration. As we begin an unpredictable recovery from the impact of COVID-19, great respect and care must be paid to the lands, lakes, forests and fields of this huge swath of the planet, spanning eleven time zones.
IOM staff in Azerbaijan help a group of stranded Sri Lankans to return home. Most were students or entrepreneurs who were unable to continue studying or trading due to COVID-19 restrictions. © IOM 2020
First, we will emphasize that there can be no recovery unless it is comprehensive and comprehensive. This means that migrants must be at the center of vaccination and care plans. We urgently need the vibrant dynamism of migration to revive our shattered economies and fight for prosperity on the path to an equitable and sustainable world.
On International Migrants Day (December 18), there is no greater inspiration to conclude than the words of the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres:
“We have seen the emergence of anti-migrant narratives that fuel xenophobia and stigma towards the very people whose contributions have been so valuable. We see an opportunity now to reinvent human mobility, to build more inclusive and resilient societies, where well-managed migration harnesses the experience and momentum of migrants to reactivate national and foreign economies.6
Notes
1. World Health Organization, “Health of refugees and migrants.” Available here
2. International Organization for Migration, World Migration Report 2020 (Geneva, 2019), pp. 2, 19, 22. Available here.
3. The office serves Southeast Europe, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. For more information, see the regional office website.
4. International Organization for Migration, “Key Migration Data 2018. SEEECA 2018: Facts and Figures” (Vienna, IOM Vienna Regional Office, 2018), p. 2. Available here
5. Dilip Ratha et al., “Data Release: Remittances to Low- and Middle-Income Countries on Track to Reach $ 551 Billion in 2019 and $ 597 Billion by 2021”, World Bank Blogs, October 16, 2019. Available at: https: / /blogs.worldbank.org/peoplemove/data-release-remittances-low-and-middle-income-countries-track-reach-551-billion-2019.
6. António Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, Speech in commemoration of International Migrants Day, December 18, 2020.
The UN Chronicle is not an official record. It is privileged to host senior United Nations officials, as well as distinguished contributors from outside the United Nations system whose views are not necessarily those of the United Nations. Similarly, boundaries and names shown, and designations used, on maps or articles do not necessarily imply endorsement or acceptance by the United Nations.
