100
B U ILDING RESILIENT MIGR A TION S Y STEMS IN T H E MEDITERR A NE A N REGION
BOX 3.2 continued However, migration and automation are not necessarily substitutable alternatives to dealing with labor shortages. Although a proposed alternative to filling jobs with immigrants is automation, robots and immigrants do not always fill the same roles. Furthermore, migrants often fill labor shortages in positions that are unattractive to native workers. In the United States, greater automation in a region is associated with a lower ability of workers in that region to work remotely, and low-skilled migrants are overrepresented in those areas (Rahman 2020). Similarly, Basso, Peri, and Rahman (2020) show that openness to immigration attenuated the job and wage polarization faced by native-born workers owing to technological change, suggesting that whereas natives and robots may be substitutable, immigrants and natives are often complementary. They also show that automation generates more migration. This may be partially because “routine-substituting” technological progress has attracted immigrants who increasingly specialize in manual service occupations that cannot be automated away. According to an alternative explanation, this may be in part because firms often have trouble recruiting natives for routine-substituting jobs that are at risk to be automated away, because they will likely be temporary positions, and thus firms may end up recruiting workers from abroad (Baruah et al. 2021). In sum, the relationship between automation and migration and how they are used to respond to labor shortages is not straightforward. More research is needed to disentangle the relationship between automation, migration, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Implications of COVID-19 for long-term migrant integration Lost schooling, lost learning The COVID-19 crisis led many countries to close schools and transition to online learning. In April 2020, schools were closed in more than 180 countries, affecting approximately 1.6 billion students (Azevedo et al. 2020). By May 2021, it was estimated that more than 80 days of schooling were lost in Italy, 60 in Greece, 50 in France, and more than 40 in Spain (OECD 2021). Countries have tried different strategies to implement remote learning, but their effectiveness has varied widely (Azevedo et al. 2020).
