Governments are seeking the balance between containing the COVID-19 pandemic and saving the economy. Migrant workers are essential in this regard, and the EU and its member states have to find ways to manage labour migration in an era of restricted mobility.

Millions of people are stranded abroad by COVID-19. The pandemic has triggered the largest repatriation operation in history. As a result, consular services are under tremendous pressure and are forced to work together.

The pandemic is teaching border agencies in Europe important lessons about operational preparedness in times of crisis. This has implications for the future in terms of training, staffing, cross-border information sharing and the use of technologies.

ICMPD field operatives track the ramifications of Covid-19 for migration in more than 90 countries. Over the past weeks, they have reported on developments in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan. Here are some of the most important.

As the coronavirus has upended life as we know it around the globe, asylum systems have not been spared. With national governments acting in different ways to stem its spread, the pandemic has resulted in a series of measures that have far-reaching consequences for asylum systems and applicants for international protection.

Due to Covid-19 lockdown, the importance of ‘key workers’ performing ‘systemically relevant’ jobs is clearer. Many of these are migrants, most of them are women. An ICMPD data survey illustrates the importance of refugees to alleviate the disruption caused by the pandemic.

Sars-CoV-2 (Covid-19) is doing to travel and migration what the 2008 financial crash did to banks and the flow of capital. Instead of a ‘credit crunch’, the world economy is crippled by a global mobility shutdown. The road back will not be easy.

In the context of increased polarisation of the migration topic among the public and policy sphere in Europe, communication on migration has gained importance: In order to reduce information gaps, build trust and gain acceptance for migration policies, innovative ways of engaging the public are needed. An initiative from Austria lends itself as a good example.

Migration ranks among the most important and contested public policy issues in many countries. In this context, the policy development process is often far away from the ‘ideal scenario’ and prone to being influenced by election cycles, public opinion or crisis situations.

Free movement of labour within the EU has led to unprecedented possibilities for EU citizens to improve their lives by moving to higher-income EU Member States. The consequences for Member States who are mostly origin countries have so far received little attention. Facing increasing challenges on their domestic labour markets, a number of EU Member States have started to develop policies in order to attract back citizens to the country.

In the past years, the terms migration and crisis have been closely linked to one another in public discourse, especially since the so-called European migration and asylum crisis of 2015/16, when Europe witnessed a significant increase of inflows of people fleeing, inter alia, war and instability in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. In this situation the EU and its Member States faced a wide range of challenges, including an overburdening of institutional capacities, the unpredictability of the migration routes and scope of inflows, as well as political disagreements on the distribution of applicants for international protection. Such crisis situations can severely impact public perception of migration and policy-making, but also provide an important learning opportunity that allows us to draw lessons on the migration and asylum systems currently in place and what is needed in terms of crisis preparedness and contingency planning.

In October 2019, the first multiannual framework kicking off the development of the Common European Asylum System, the Tampere Programme, celebrates its 20th anniversary. Since then, three further multiannual programmes followed: the Hague Programme, the Stockholm Programme and the European Agenda on Migration. Each of the programmes emerged from very specific situations – either dominated by the accession of new Member States to the EU or by an increased inflow of applicants for international protection. During all these years, the vision of Tampere remained untouched; but is it still shared and backed by all of today’s EU Member States? This article is an extract of a chapter taken from the working paper “Harmonising asylum systems in Europe – a means or an end per se?” published in the framework of the EU Horizon 2020 funded research project, CEASEVAL and is accessible at its webpage.

The EU is strongly divided over the question of how to address international protection within the EU. The high numbers of mixed flows arriving at the borders of the EU in 2015/2016, transiting through several EU Member States (MS) and eventually seeking refuge in a handful of destination countries showed how vulnerable the EU's migration and asylum system is.

References to skills of refugees with the aim of creating pathways for protection can be found in the context of the Global Compact on Refugees. But they were (at least initially) also intended to lead to a more purposeful relocation of asylum seekers from Italy or Greece to other EU MS under the EU relocation programme which ran from September 2016 until September 2018. Recently, several publications additionally addressed the question of refugee protection and a possible connection with labour market considerations.

In terms of global protracted displacement, it is major refugee-hosting countries within the region of conflict who shoulder the majority of the responsibility for responding to the needs of refugees. Such countries have development challenges of their own, and the international community should support them in maximising the potential benefits and mitigating the challenges associated with hosting refugees.