Coordination breakdown: the impacts of COVID-19 on migration in Europe – World – ReliefWeb

By Frey Lindsay

Executive Summary

The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped migration and mobility in Europe, and some of the impacts still linger. In many ways, Europe was better prepared than other regions to respond to the pandemic and its effects on cross-border mobility. Europe had strong coordinating institutions, an existing freedom of movement agreement, world-leading scientific and public-health capacities, and stronger social protection systems and economies than most regions. Despite these advantages, cross-border travel shut down, migrant and refugee flows dropped, and migrant worker unemployment spiked across the region in the pandemics early phase.

The first months of the pandemic saw an unprecedented shutdown in cross-border mobility. Even borders within Europes Schengen Area of free movement were reinstated, with land border controls and travel bans for nonresidents maintained for several months in 2020. As the virus circulated across Europe, countries began to restart mobility through testing and isolation, exemptions, and a traffic light system to assign travel measures according to a travelers region of origin or transit, based on different metrics of risk. However, a lack of coordination undermined these early efforts. The real game changer was the EU Digital COVID Certificate, which by mid-2021 allowed countries to verify a travelers proof of vaccination, testing, or recovery from prior infection. This system was widely adopted and helped Europe move toward targeting travel measures to each persons risk profile rather than restricting travel from entire countries. Thus, the European case offers some hope that regional cooperation can work, while nonetheless underscoring the challenges to cooperation on migration in times of crisis.

The pandemic had a significant and sudden impact on labor mobility, within and into Europe, with implications for employment and labor markets throughout the region. Initially, migrant worker unemployment rose in most sectors, with the gap between migrant and native-born unemployment rates growing across all European countries. But some policy decisions, including regularization policies, mitigated some of the worst impacts. Trends include:

The pandemics impacts on migrant workers were more severe in countries where migrants often have insecure contracts and work in sectors such as tourism that were devastated by the pandemic (e.g., Spain and Sweden), than in those with more generous job retention programs and social protection (e.g., France and Switzerland). Migrant employment began to recover relatively quickly, but it took until 2021 to begin growing at pre-pandemic rates. Many workers from other EU Member States returned home in the first months of the pandemic, particularly to Eastern Europe, meaning the number of intra-EU workers dropped more than the number of third-country national workers in EU labor markets. This seems to be both because moving home to another European country was comparatively easier and because intra-EU workers were more willing to leave as it appeared easier for them to return than it would be for a third-country national who might have to reapply for visas or save funds for the journey.

Governments also tapped into existing populations to meet labor demand. As migrant workers returned to Eastern Europe and other regions, Italy and Spain gave regular status to many irregular migrants, and France tried to attract unemployed or furloughed native-born workers into agriculture. Governments also exempted essential workers (such as farm workers) from border restrictions or quickly expanded visa routes and recruited new workers for the agricultural harvest, as in Germany and the United Kingdom.

Virtually all types of migration dropped in 2020: first residence permits for third-country nationals decreased by 24 percent in just one year. Governments prioritized restarting labor migration, but most other types of movement recovered far more slowly. The impacts of COVID-19 travel measures on migration were starkest in the first two years of the pandemic, which are the primary focus of this report, and were felt by both irregular and regular mobility, although the former recovered quicker than the latter.

International student flows dropped precipitously, with first residence permits for education dropping more than any other category in 2020. Although easing travel restrictions allowed students to return to Europe in 2021, student arrivals have generally been slow to recover to pre-pandemic levels. The United Kingdom, however, announced a new visa that allows graduate students to work for two years after graduation, prompting a significant increase in issuance of student visas in 2021 that exceeded pre-pandemic levels by 55 percent.

Refugee resettlement remains low, but asylum applications have rebounded. Resettlement to Europe was more resilient than in regions and countries with stricter border controls (e.g., Australia), but refugee resettlements declined 40 percent from 2019 to 2020 and remained less than three-quarters of pre-pandemic levels by 2021. By contrast, asylum applications dropped in March 2020 and stayed low as European countries adjusted to telework and remote asylum proceedings, but application numbers began to recover by June and met pre-pandemic levels in mid-2021.

Irregular migration exceeds pre-pandemic levels, but government policies have contributed to a shift toward more dangerous routes. Stricter border policies in Cyprus and Greece, justified by those governments in part by the pandemics public-health risks, caused the number of irregular arrivals in those countries to drop and numbers in Italy and Spain to jump. As migrants turned to more dangerous irregular migration routes, recorded deaths in the Mediterranean increased by 41 percent in 2021.

The contrasting recoveries of different forms of migration to and within Europe underscore the importance of effective migration policymaking in times of uncertainty. Three policy trends emerged within Europe and continue to shape migration patterns and policies even as the focus on the pandemic has waned. First, the success of the EU Digital COVID Certificate, despite privacy and equity concerns, represented a shift back to regional cooperation on borders and offers a tool to help countries re-open quickly if a future health crisis shuts down mobility. Second, the enduring shift to digital migration and asylum processing sparked by office closures and social distancing will force policymakers to balance the advantages of streamlined digitalization with the risks to privacy and data protection. Third, COVID-19s shutdown in global labor mobility and related labor shortages accelerated a policy focus on skilled migration programs, which will be crucial to meeting future labor demand while building human capital and socioeconomic opportunities in Europe. Recognizing these trends and the lessons of the pandemic can equip policymakers in Europe and beyond to prepare contingency plans for the next public-health crisis and strategically move toward a more effective and coordinated plan for migration.

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Coordination breakdown: the impacts of COVID-19 on migration in Europe - World - ReliefWeb