May 17, 2022

Dear John xxxxxx,

Two years after the pandemic shut down global mobility, most countries are now reopening for international travel. While it is becoming easier for many to put the unprecedented shock to cross-border mobility—and its enormous human costs—out of mind, doing so would mean missing out on a crucial learning moment. Governments have not properly reviewed the lessons of the past two years or prepared contingency plans for future COVID-19 variants or public health crises. Instead, in the process of opening up, inequalities in the global mobility system are deepening—perhaps for good.

In a new commentary, MPI experts Meghan Benton and Lawrence Huang underscore the need for a more resilient global architecture on borders and mobility, and argue that to achieve such a system, governments and other stakeholders could be guided by a set of four principles: Travel measures, from border closures to testing requirements, should be clear, equitable, streamlined, and future focused.

Advancing these principles will require closer coordination and dialogue between health, border, and migration authorities, and between governments worldwide. MPI’s side event at this week’s International Migration Review Forum (IMRF)—where key governments, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the World Health Organization (WHO) will reflect on border policies during the pandemic and paths forward to promote global consensus on mobility in public health crises—represents an opportunity in this regard.

“The challenges to managing borders and mobility in public health crises should be addressed now, before the next variant,” Benton and Huang write, “and should work to minimize the widening gulf between movers and non-movers.”

You can read the commentary here: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/news/managing-mobility-pandemic-shared-principles.

Best regards,

The MPI team

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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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