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COVID-19 and the global addiction to cheap migrant labour

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the world’s structural dependence on exploitable labour.

COVID-19 and the global addiction to cheap migrant labour
Bangladeshi Migrant workers waiting at the Saudi Arabian airline offices to collect return tickets back to their work destinations. 4 October 2020 | Picture by Sazzad Hossain SOPA Images/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved
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With COVID-19 disrupting travel, shutting borders, and redefining what is essential work, Pandemic Borders explores what international migration will look like after the pandemic, in this series titled #MigrantFutures 

In November 2019, a federal government official visited the University of Toronto’s Munk School and asked its faculty to delineate coming global threats. We spoke of inequality, hunger, climate change, sanitation, and plastic pollution, among others. No one mentioned a microbe; a discussion of the threat of immunity to antibiotics was as close as we got.