Early Evidence on COVID-19, Mobility, and Migration

The first webinar in the RECOVR series, hosted by IPA and the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation & Scale (Y-RISE), centered on COVID-19, mobility, and migration. Contexts in which people are migrating or mobile present unique challenges. Households that rely on the incomes of migrant workers are particularly vulnerable to the pandemic’s economic impacts, as many workers who typically send remittances home are losing income. Meanwhile, many displaced people live in crowded settings where social distancing guidelines may be prohibitively difficult. Return migration in both groups threatens to contribute to the disease’s spread.

Mushfiq Mobarak (Yale University) began the webinar with an overview on the various ways in which COVID-19 and migration are linked. Mahreen Khan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) spoke about a new paper that uses migration data to predict the disease’s spread, and discussed the implications of COVID-19’s links to migration for sector-specific economic policy guidance to Bangladesh’s government. Shariful Islam Hasan (BRAC) spoke about how these considerations are informing BRAC’s migrant reintegration programs, and Ashish Shenoy (University of California, Davis) discussed the implications of these results for designing and evaluating returnee support and reintegration programs. Finally, Kathleen Newland (Migration Policy Institute) elucidated the implications for global migration policy. Radha Rajkotia (IPA) hosted and moderated the event.