CESA Conference

Anna Triandafyllidou

Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration, Ryerson University, Toronto

Sustainability and Resilience in Migration Governance for a post-Pandemic World

Stalled mobility in COVID-19 times has both deepened the precarity of temporary workers and created new challenges for settled migrants. It has also created unprecedented challenges for origin, destination and transit countries. As the pandemic seems to be shifting to a more manageable epidemic, considering how migration and mobility has changed during these two years presents an opportunity for reflection so as to ‘build back better’. This paper starts by discussion the notions of resilience and sustainability in migration governance with a special focus to the turn towards temporary migration in the last 10-15 years around the world. The paper compares between destinations (and regional migration systems) that favour openly temporary migration like for instance the UAE, those that privilege long term migration openly but allowing silently for significant temporary and two step migration like Canada and Australia, and those in-between that actually do not proactively manage immigration but allow for both long term and temporary moves to take place and adjust afterwards. Through a critical analysis of these different approaches, the paper traces the contours of a sustainable and resilient migration governance approach. The features of such a system bring together different elements of existing approaches among those studied alongside several reflections and recommendations arising from research and not yet implemented anywhere. The presentation will conclude with some reflections on the Canadian immigration approach going forward.