Stop, in the name of COVID!
Authors: Klein Jordan D. , Weber Ingmar , Zagheni Emilio 
Published: October 2022

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, travel restrictions implemented to prevent its spread, likethe suspension of international transit and closure of borders, first put into place in March 2020, oftensuddenly, have created complex, fast-evolving networks of restrictions between the countries of origin anddestination of migrants and would-be migrants. These restrictions have had a particularly noteworthyimpact on migrants from North and West Africa, who have reported experiencing greater impacts from thepandemic on their journeys than migrants from any other region in the world, as flows registered throughkey transit points in West and Central Africa and irregular arrivals to Europe plummeted, especiallyalong the Western Mediterranean Route key to migrants from North and West Africa. The InternationalOrganization for Migration (IOM) has postulated that international migrant stocks have fallen wellshort of their pre-pandemic projections in West/North Africa and Europe due to travel restrictions, partof an overall global shortfall between March and July 2020 of nearly 2 million. However, this is nottestable with migration data from traditional sources like censuses and population surveys, which ontop of pre-existing timeliness and granularity limitations, have had data collection operations delayed,canceled, interrupted, or data quality otherwise seriously compromised by the pandemic. Recognizingthese challenges, key migration stakeholders, including the IOM, have called for the use of data fromalternative sources, including social media, to fill in these gaps. Inspired by this call, we endeavor totest the hypothesis that COVID-related travel restrictions reduced migrant stock compared to what itwould have been in the absence of such restrictions using estimates of migrants drawn from Facebook’sadvertising platform, looking specifically at four key origin countries in North and West Africa, Côted’Ivoire, Algeria, Morocco, and Senegal, and their 23 key destination countries. We take advantage of the quasi-natural experiment provided by different countries’ staggered adoption of different levels of travelrestrictions, which we formulate as a treatment, and attempt to control for non-travel restriction-relatedfactors that may be simultaneously influencing migration, using the method developed by Arellano andBond for estimating dynamic linear panel models. We estimate that a destination country implementinga total entry ban on arrivals from Côte d’Ivoire, Algeria, Morocco, or Senegal over the course of a monthbetween March and June 2020 may have expected a 3.39% reduction in migrant stock from the restrictedcountry compared to the counterfactual in which no travel restrictions were implemented. However,when taking pandemic-related mortality, broader restrictions on activity and movement, and the onsetof the global pandemic itself into account, we estimate that a destination country implementing an entryban over the course of a month may expect a 5.47% increase in migrant stock. While further research isneeded on both the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on migration and using social media data to obtainaccurate migration estimates, in the context of the wider disruptions wrought by the pandemic, travelrestrictions do not appear to have been effective in curbing migration in the countries that implementedthem and may result in outcomes that run counter to their intended effects.