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The Migration Policy Institute

October 1, 2020

Dear John xxxxxx,

The COVID-19 pandemic has scrambled just about every aspect of human mobility. It led governments around the world to slam their external borders shut and, in some cases, impose internal border restrictions. It brought international travel to near shutdown in the early weeks and months, with a halting recovery since. And it has put much of migration—whether for love, work, or refuge—on ice.

The changes have been vast and stretched across the globe. And the repercussions of this sudden and dramatic halt to mobility will be profound. They will almost certainly lead to transformations and innovations that will reshape travel and migration for the foreseeable future—maybe even for good.

I will explore many facets of these issues in a new podcast from the Migration Policy Institute, Moving Beyond Pandemic. Among the questions we will tackle:
  • Is this a 9/11 moment for travel and health?
  • Do quarantines work?
  • Can COVID-19 testing in airports help revive ailing tourism industries?
  • How are hardened borders affecting the business model for human smugglers and traffickers?

In our first episode, “Australia and the ‘Biosecure Border’ in the Age of COVID-19,” I speak with Brendan Dowling, the senior representative in the Americas region for the Australian government’s Department of Home Affairs. With hard travel lockdowns in and out of the country, internal border restrictions, and quarantine, Australia is trying to create a “biosecure border” and is serving as a bit of a test case for other countries. But how long can the country sustain this model in an interconnected world?

Tune in to this first episode, and I hope you’ll keep up with our series. Next week’s episode is a very interesting conversation with an official at the Vienna airport, which became one of the first in the world to offer arriving passengers onsite coronavirus testing, permitting those who test negative to avoid the Austrian government’s mandate for a 14-day quarantine. If successful at grand scale, this approach could boost the return of business travel and tourism, as we explore.

You can find Moving Beyond Pandemic wherever you listen to podcasts or at www.migrationpolicy.org/podcasts. I hope you’ll tune in and subscribe.

And for all of MPI’s work on COVID-19, check out www.migrationpolicy.org/coronavirus.

Stay safe and be well!

Meghan Benton
Director of Research
MPI International Program and MPI Europe

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The Migration Policy Institute is an independent, nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. dedicated to analysis of the movement of people worldwide. MPI provides analysis, development, and evaluation of migration and refugee policies at the local, national, and international levels. For more on MPI, please visit www.migrationpolicy.org.

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