Geneva-Sana
International migration rates rose last year, despite the significant repercussions of the Covid pandemic on the movement of migration, including the imposition of restrictions that prevented many from crossing the borders of other countries.
In a recent report reported by Agence France-Presse, the International Organization for Migration said that the number of international migrants in 2020 reached 281 million, representing 3.6% of the world's population.
The number compares to 272 million migrants worldwide in 2019, who represented 3.5 percent of the world's population.
The number is 200 million more than the figures of 1970, when 84 million international migrants were counted, representing 3 percent of the world's population.
But the Organization for Migration confirmed that had it not been for the pandemic, which has complicated the movement of people between borders, a million additional migrants would have been recorded last year.
The organization's report stated that Covid 19 acted as a major obstacle to migration and movement around the world.. In the first year of the pandemic, the authorities imposed 108,000 travel restrictions, while the number of air travelers decreased by 60 percent, to 1.8 billion people, compared to 4.5 billion in 2019.
"Covid has changed the world and touched all aspects of migration," the report's author, Marie McAuliffe, told reporters, adding, "It certainly had an impact on migration and certainly had a negative impact on mobility."
At the same time, the growth of international migration has slowed, and UN figures show an increase in intra-state movement last year due to disasters, conflict and violence.
“We are witnessing a paradox that we have not seen in human history,” the Director-General of the Organization for Migration, Antonio Vitorino, said in a statement, explaining that while “Covid 19” stopped the movement of billions of people, tens of millions more were displaced within their countries.
To follow SANA news on Telegram: https://t.me/SyrianArabNewsAgency