International migration has increased despite COVID-19 restrictions, UN says – Channels Television
International migration increased last year despite the dramatic impact of the Covid pandemic on migration patterns, including restrictions preventing many people from crossing borders, the United Nations said on Wednesday.
In a new report, the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM) said the number of international migrants rose to 281 million in 2020, or 3.6 percent of the world’s population.
This represents an increase from the 272 million international migrants recorded in 2019, when they represented 3.5% of the world population.
And this is nearly 200 million more than in 1970, when barely 84 million international migrants were registered, or 2.3% of the world population.
But IOM stressed that there would have been two million more international migrants last year without the pandemic, which has made cross-border travel much more complicated.
According to the report, Covid-19 has acted as a “big disruptor” to migration and mobility around the world.
In the pandemic’s first year alone, some 108,000 travel restrictions were introduced, while the number of air passengers globally plunged 60% to 1.8 billion, from 4.5 billion in 2019.
Covid “has undoubtedly changed the world, and it has touched all aspects of migration,” report author Marie McAuliffe told reporters ahead of the launch.
“It certainly had an impact on migration. And it certainly had a negative impact on mobility.
Along with the slowdown in the growth of international migration, UN figures show that internal displacement due to disasters, conflict and violence has skyrocketed last year.
About 40.5 million people were forced to flee the interior of the country in 2020, up from 31.5 million a year earlier.
This brought the total number of people living in internal displacement to 55 million at the end of 2020, from 51 million a year earlier.
“We are witnessing a paradox never seen before in human history,” IOM chief Antonio Vitorino said in a statement.
“While billions of people have been effectively grounded by Covid-19, tens of millions more have been displaced within their own countries. “
AFP