Comparative perspectives on migration, diversities and the pandemic

The global COVID-19 pandemic has challenged social life in profound ways, including migration and migration-related diversities. It has challenged and sometimes deepened existing social structures and inequalities as well as created new ones. However, the precise impact of COVID-19 often remains unclear, as do the broader implications for how we conceptualize and theorize migration and diversities in the field of migration studies. Whereas on the one hand the pandemic showed that global population movements could be constrained at least temporarily, it may also have deepened inequalities as one of the root causes of population movements. And while the pandemic at least temporarily reinforced the national frameworks for inclusion, including but not limited to health, emerging scholarship in the area suggests that it deepened inequalities, exacerbated the access to basic provisions and widened social cleavages within these national frameworks.