How Has COVID-19 Affected the Intention to Migrate via the Backway to Europe and to a Neighboring African Country? Survey Evidence and a Salience Experiment in The Gambia
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in border closures in many countries and a sharp reduction in overall international mobility. However, this disruption of legal pathways to migration has raised concerns that potential migrants may turn to irregul...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/551791620830976251/How-Has-COVID-19-Affected-the-Intention-to-Migrate-via-the-Backway-to-Europe http://hdl.handle.net/10986/35571 |
| Summary: | The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in
border closures in many countries and a sharp reduction in
overall international mobility. However, this disruption of
legal pathways to migration has raised concerns that
potential migrants may turn to irregular migration routes as
a substitute. This paper examines how the pandemic has
changed intentions to migrate from The Gambia, the country
with the highest pre-pandemic per-capita irregular migration
rates in Africa. A large-scale panel survey conducted in
2019 and 2020 is used to compare changes in intentions to
migrate to Europe and to neighboring Senegal. The data show
that the pandemic has reduced the intention to migrate to
both destinations, with approximately one-third of young
males expressing less intention to migrate. The largest
reductions in migration intentions are for individuals who
were unsure of their intent pre-pandemic, and for poorer
individuals who are no longer able to afford the costs of
migrating at a time when these costs have increased and
their remittance income has fallen. This paper also
introduces the methodology of priming experiments to the
study of migration intentions, by randomly varying the
salience of the COVID-19 pandemic before eliciting
intentions to migrate. There is no impact of this added
salience, which appears to be because knowledge of the
virus, while imperfect, was already enough to inform
migration decisions. Nevertheless, despite these decreases
in intentions, the overall desire to migrate the backway to
Europe remains high, highlighting the need for legal
migration pathways to support migrants and divert them from
the risks of backway migration. |
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