Having emerged in a global world with its high cross-border population mobility, the COVID‑19 pandemic could not but affect the basic characteristics of this process. Almost everywhere, partial or complete restrictions on movements between countries and within individual nations have been recognized as one of the most effective means of combating the spread of the infection. This resulted in a broad blocking of tourist flows and business trips, as well as in the increased difficulties of students studying abroad and the serious reduction of labour mobility. The problems associated with the need to regulate migration flows in emergency conditions are considered in the article using the example of two – at first glance different, but in fact clearly overlapping – country cases. The selection of Italy and Sweden is not accidental. These nations have demonstrated both similarities and differences in the objective circumstances and subjective factors that determined their chosen strategies to combat the pandemic and the priorities of their migration policies. The deep differences in socio-cultural traditions and the dissimilarity of these strategies between the two countries are reflected, in particular, in the divergent impact of COVID‑19 and its consequences on social cohesion, weakening it in Italy and strengthening it in Sweden. The increased relevance of the problem of migration in the mass consciousness that associated with the coronavirus pandemic is fraught with the emergence and spread of erroneous stereotypes, philistine phobias, and conspiracy theories. This explains the revival of the tendency to strengthen the role of anti-immigrant populist and nationalist parties and movements, which may lead to a corresponding change in the configuration and balance of political forces.
Under virtual labor migration, or telemigration, in the expert community it is customary to understand remote work or the provision of services that are carried out in a cross-border format. The presence of the word migration in this term logically prompts us to consider the designated process in a migration context. From the standpoint of the concept of migration transition, the spread of virtual migration can be interpreted as a new link in the chain of mobility transformations generated by multifaceted digital transformations. With this kind of migration, a person crosses only virtual borders of states and, without leaving the country of residence, actually works outside it and performs the tasks of a foreign customer in a remote electronic mode. The short duration and rapid turnover of most jobs in cyberspace makes this process extremely circulatory, uncharacteristic of traditional labor relations. So far, this employment model has been limited in scope, but it is rapidly developing, having gained great momentum in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and may become significant in the future. While paying dividends to workers and employers interacting in global digitalized labor markets, virtual migration simultaneously exacerbates chronic imbalances and generates new sources of social tension. They are connected, among other things, with the global asymmetry of socioeconomic and digital development, the emergence of new factors and areas of competition for workers in the labor market, and insufficient social protection of the workers. Optimization of the development of virtual migration could be facilitated by comprehensive regulatory measures at the level of international organizations, states, and companies.
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