Implications of COVID-19 for long-term migrant integration

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.

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).

m obilit Y - r el A ted i m P li C A tions o F C ovid - 19 F or r e C eiving Co U ntries 101

The effects of short-term school closures can persist long into the future and be particularly detrimental for vulnerable groups. Hanushek and Woessmann (2020) show that if one-third of a school year was lost, the average current student might expect something on the order of 2.5–4 percent lower future career earnings if schools immediately returned to 2019 performance levels. They also emphasize that these losses will be permanent unless the schools return to better performance levels than those in 2019. Similarly, Azevedo et al. (2020) predict that a five-month school closure could lead nearly 7 million students to drop out of school and result in a 2–8 percent reduction in the yearly future earnings of the average student from today’s cohort in primary or secondary school.

Greater impacts on migrants’ children

Language barriers . Although these learning and potential earning losses are universal for all students during the COVID-19 pandemic, the impacts are even more severe for migrants and refugees, who face several additional barriers. For example, students from households that speak a language at home other than the language of instruction in school have seen larger learning losses. Large shares of foreign-born 15-year-old students do not speak the language of instruction at home. In some Mediterranean countries, this share is as large as one quarter of all foreign-born students (figure 3.3).

Students who speak a different language at home are already approximately one year of schooling behind their peers (OECD 2015). Those students who immigrated at a later age face even more difficulty catching up. Maldonado and de Witte (2020) find that while primary school students in the Dutch-speaking Flemish region of Belgium, on the whole, experienced learning losses because of pandemic-related school closures, schools with higher shares of students who do not speak the language of instruction (Dutch) at home saw larger learning losses in their language arts classes.

Socioeconomic disadvantages . Immigrant students are more likely to come from socioeconomically disadvantaged homes—another factor that makes them more vulnerable to falling behind (figure 3.4). Furthermore, in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, immigrant parents are 17 percentage points less likely than native-born parents to be involved in their child’s school community, and this lower parental engagement is associated with lower levels of academic performance and belonging at school (OECD 2018). In Israel, more than half of all foreign-born students come from disadvantaged homes, as opposed to just over a third of native-born students.

Several studies have shown that the learning losses caused by pandemic-related school closures are even more extreme for these students. In Australia, following an eight-week school closure, students from disadvantaged schools achieved the equivalent of two months’ less improvement in mathematics test scores