The year 2020 will go down in history as the “Year of COVID-19”, when a new coronavirus emerged and spread across the world in a series of waves that by 2021 had impacted the lives of almost every person on the planet. New words emerged in common discourse that just a year prior would have had different or little meaning:“zoom”,“lockdown”,“social distancing”,“PPE”,“face mask” or “contact tracing”. Two other words have particular implications for migration:“border closure” and “quarantine”.

Over the course of the first year of the pandemic, more than 108,000 COVID-related international travel restrictions were put in place by countries, territories or areas, in addition to the rolling implementation of internal movement restrictions within countries. 2 Consequently, the global travel industry has been decimated by the pandemic. The initial race to implement restrictions had a significant and immediate impact on air travel around the world. By early May 2020, for example, the number of international flights had decreased by around 80 per cent globally. 3 As a result, tourism–one of the largest industries in the world–faced a similar decline in 2020, with losses of about USD 2 trillion or 2 per cent of global GDP. 4 Further, COVID-19 acted as a brake on international migration, with the United Nations estimating that the pandemic had slowed the growth in the stock of international migrants by around two million by mid-2020, or 27 per cent less than the growth expected. 5