How Health Crises Cause Migration Waves

Governments of destination countries have worldwide been searching for answers to the question: why do people migrate? What are their key motivators, and what holds them back?

When Jørgen Carling asked the question, he found it incredibly difficult to distinguish answers or to list them from most prevalent to less. The link between ‘push and pull’ motivators is inseparable; he reasons all migrants leave in general hopes of a better life and tend to choose the path of least resistance.

Health crises tend to be linked to other issues and are rarely named as the sole reason to move.

However, a few epidemics and pandemics have overridden this logic; in these cases, we can assume health to be the primary cause for population mobility.

A Short History of Recent Health Crises

Health governance has always been an essential part of global governance, but it is also one of the slowest to evolve as it meets the usual hurdles of cooperation, such as national sovereignty and difficulty in coordinating different government regimes, but has lacked the increasing political pressure that economic and military policies carry. Health pressures populations who must exert their influence on policymakers in order to bring about change.

The World Health Organization adopted International Sanitary Regulations in 1951, which it renamed International Health Regulations (IHR) in 1969. This focused on the prevention of the spread of specific infectious diseases to minimize their disruption of trade and mobility. Cholera, yellow fever, plague, and smallpox were of privileged concern in the IHRs.

The early 2000s showed that globalization reached health crises too, as both the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and the 2009 H1N1 spread all over the world in a very short time.

In 2007, the Public Health Events of International Concern (PHEICs) were introduced, as international cooperation overtook the practice of specific disease control. The biggest step forward in international disease control was the COVID-19 pandemic, where international connections resulted in a worldwide lockdown that involved a wide range of migration management tools.

COVID-19: Health Overrides All

The Covid-19 Pandemic was an unprecedented lesson in world health management and international cooperation to protect health facilities and personnel from an unknown but rapidly spreading contagion.

Travel restrictions were the most major policy to control the spread, which caused the shutdown of global mobility, causing issues not just for migration, as refugee resettlement and access to asylum were cut, but for the world economy, especially trade, tourism, and education.

But movement could not be stopped; though regulated and legal migration dropped significantly, illegal migration routes became more popular as people grew more desperate. Experts estimate it likely that the present surge in illegal migration is possible because of the expansion of illegal channels during lockdown.

Furthermore, before COVID-19, the WHO only advised cancelling travel plans if someone felt sick in 2003 during the SARS outbreak and its guidelines were against travel bans during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.

However, in 2003, both Russia and Kazakhstan closed borders with China, and in 2009, China suspended direct flights from Mexico and even quarantined passengers if their body temperature was above 37.5 degrees Celsius. This did little to stop the spread of either virus.

The example of Covid also underlines the idea that migration cannot be attributed to a single cause. Even during a worldwide pandemic, despite over 100,000 travel- and health-related laws aimed to limit movement, migration continued. It is paramount to recognize that despite this, SARS-CoV-2’s spread was only slowed but not stopped.

Climate Crisis: Disaster and Disease

Other issues tend to appear hand-in-hand with health crises; the climate crisis is just one, but the two occurrences frequently overlap.

The climate crisis has caused many humanitarian disasters, like floods, hurricanes, or tsunamis that have forced people into migration. It can also cause health crises with food shortages, air pollution, and mutated diseases. Scientists say these hazards will only increase as the crisis deepens.

In relation to health, it is not likely that people will be prompted to leave their country ‘just’ for health reasons, but a combination of several. Because of this, experts detail climate-induced migration as increasingly difficult to identify since the disaster motivating people to leave is also economic, social, and political.

These reasons are interconnected; in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, drought-induced migration is caused only in part by the lack of water, as armed conflicts and the weaponization of water cause migration waves towards Europe.

Health as an Excuse to Stop Migration?

Disease transmissions cannot be stopped at borders, wrote Michael Edelstein, David Heymann, and Khalid Koser in their article on health crises and migration. They concluded, like many other experts, that large-scale population movement is rarely a result of health crises, attributing migration to wider humanitarian crises, only a part of which are health concerns.

Covid-19 showed how authorities are willing to crack down on mobility to be able to control health crises, despite the WHO and scientific evidence suggesting that such measures cannot stop these crises. Critics are increasingly concerned that their real interest does not lie in protecting populations or migrants but in protecting wider health infrastructure.

Migration, in the meantime, continues, with or without restrictions, legally and illegally. Tough health concerns these migrants; it is in equal parts a motivator to leave and to arrive, but numbers show that migrants usually decide to move due to a combination of several motivators; health crises tend to be farther down their list of concerns.