March 4, 2020

Dear John xxxxxx,

As public-health officials race to keep the coronavirus from becoming a full-blown global pandemic, governments around the world have been dipping into the migration management toolbox, deploying everything from border closures and travel restrictions to prohibitions on arrivals from countries such as China, Iran, and Italy.

Yet applying border controls to the spread of disease is like trying to catch water with a sieve, as a new Migration Policy Institute (MPI) commentary explains. These restrictions have little chance of netting the real threat, and can have counterintuitive effects, such as incentivizing people to evade detection by lying about recent travel or masking illness symptoms.  

Bold measures taken in the name of containing the spread of disease are often fig leaves for broader aims: reducing “undesirable” migration and curtailing the openness that has been blamed for uncontrolled movements of asylum seekers and migrants. Greece and Hungary, for example, have announced they will refuse to accept any asylum seekers for a month. And President Trump has suggested he is considering closing the U.S.-Mexico border, despite the fact that there are far more reported coronavirus cases in the United States than in Mexico.

“Symbolic responses that make a big splash can give false confidence that ultimately backfires if governments miss a critical period for targeted interventions that do work,” write Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan, Meghan Benton, and Susan Fratzke.

You can find the commentary here: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/news/coronavirus-not-a-migration-problem.

Best regards,

Michelle Mittelstadt
Director of Communications and Public Affairs
Migration Policy Institute