Human mobility and the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America

The Covid-19 pandemic hit Latin America in the context of increasingly complex intra-and extra-regional migration dynamics and during a period of rising socio-economic and legal vulnerability for migrants and refugees across all stages of the migration cycle. In this chapter, we depart from our previous work on the Venezuelan displacement in South America to juxtapose this crisis with other displacement experiences in Central America and the Caribbean. Examining three migration phases—transit, residence, and return—we discuss the impact of the pandemic, as well as related policy changes, on the region's migrant and refugee population, including their increasing exclusion from social services and formal labor markets and exposure to discriminatory and xenophobic treatment. These changes have led to increasing precarity and insecurity and had detrimental effects on migrants’ physical and psychosocial well-being.