A window of opportunity for action on migration?

At the beginning of June, UN Secretary-General António Guterres released a policy brief highlighting what he called the coronavirus pandemic’s “disproportionate impact” on asylum seekers and regular and irregular migrants.

The virus, and the impacts of national responses to it, have magnified existing inequalities in access to healthcare, safety, and economic security.

However, according to the UN brief, they also present the inter-national community with an opportunity to “reimagine human mobility for the benefit of all”.

Around the world, a number of local and national governments have responded to the virus by taking steps to protect the health and human rights of irregular migrants and asylum seekers as part of their overall efforts although this inclusive approach is far from the norm.

The measures, following the recommendations of the UN and migration policy experts and advocates, include providing access to health-care and social services, visa and residency permit extensions, stays on deportations, releases from immigration detention, and, in the case of Italy, an immigration amnesty.

Many of the policies are limited in scope and time-bound to the current crisis. But seen against a backdrop of responses that have otherwise ranged from neglect to outright hostility, policy experts hope the positive measures could point towards a more sensible and humane approach to migration even after the extraordinary circumstances of this pandemic subside.

“The main positive change that we’re seeing is a lot of ideas that were previously entirely off the table have to be considered a lot more seriously now,” Olivia Sundberg Diez, a migra-tion policy analyst at the European Policy Centre, a Brussels-based think tank, told The New Humanitarian.

“Some of this, of course, has a humanitarian ground behind it, but a big consideration is public health,” Diez added.

“You need to ensure that everybody within your territory has sufficient access to public health.

Otherwise, nobody is protected if not everybody is protected.”

Fears about impending food shortages and the deaths of immigrant medical workers during the pandemic have also highlighted the dependence of essential industries in economies around the world on both regular and irregular migrant labour.

Most of the measures that have been adopted to protect these people “are absolutely essential simply for the survival of the economies – and ultimately the people of the countries where those migrants are,” said Patrick Taran, president of Global Migration Policy Associates, a Geneva-based consultancy.

While positive measures have not been the predominant response, “we have some good signs that point to what can be,” Taran added.

When cases of coronavirus first started to surge outside China at the end of February, aid organisations and human rights groups quickly began to sound the alarm about the potentially devastating impact the virus could have on refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants who often live in crowded areas with limited access to proper sanitation facilities, healthcare, and social services.

At the same time, sealed borders and lockdowns made it more difficult for people fleeing wars and persecution to reach places of safety and left migrants stranded in difficult conditions around the world.

Some governments also saw the crisis as an opportunity to push through hardline migration policies that had nothing to do with protecting public health but advanced long-standing anti-refugee and anti-immigration agendas.

As the pandemic accelerated, at the end of March, UN agencies put forward an initial set of broad guidelines calling on governments to release people from immigration detention centres, uphold the right to asylum and include refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented people in public health and relief efforts.

Over two months later, “there have been some positive developments,” Leonard Doyle, a spokesperson for the UN’s migration agency, IOM, told TNH.

Portugal announced early on that it would treat all foreigners in the country with pending immigration applications as residents, at least until 1 July, allowing them to access healthcare and social services; Ireland granted undocumented migrants full access to healthcare and social welfare, including the country’s pandemic unemployment fund; and, in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia and Qatar said that they would provide free healthcare to migrant labourers regardless of their legal status.

Elsewhere, state and local governments have taken the initiative to include undocumented people in their efforts to contain and mitigate the effects of the virus, even as national governments have been indifferent or hostile to such efforts.

In Brazil where the number of cases is spiralling and the response has fallen to local communities undocumented migrants in São Paulo can access food aid and the city’s municipal hospital network, and the US state of California and the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota bothlaunched relief funds specifically for undocumented residents affected by the pandemic.

A number of other cities in the United States have also taken steps to ensure undocumented people can access healthcare and social services.

Numerous countries in Europe, Central America, South America, and elsewhere have extended the validity of visas and residency permits to ensure people do not end up becoming undocumented while government offices are closed due to lockdowns, and at least 10 EU member states have stopped or significantly reduced deportations of undocumented migrants.

A number of European countries, Japan, and Mexico have also released people from immigration detention centres to prevent out-breaks in overcrowded, unhygenic facilities, and Spain took the unprecedented step of completely emptying its immigration detention centres in early May.

Author is a freelance journalist focused on migration