Until March 2020, movement was normal: the world had become used to over half a century of broadly continuous rises in global mobility, fuelled by growing international trade, cheaper and more plentiful flights, and the rising aspirations of the planet’s ever-growing population. 

Defining expatriates as people who stay in a foreign country for between six months and five years, Finaccord’s new report, Global Expatriates: Size, Segmentation and Forecast for the Worldwide Market 2023, estimates that there were 68.8 million worldwide in 2019.

This made Covid-19, officially labelled a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020, an unprecedented shock in the age of mobility. Borders closed, planes emptied, plans to move were cancelled or put on hold, and millions of expatriates around the world faced new dilemmas: unsure of when, or even if, travel would return to normal, should they stay or return home?

Responses to the pandemic

Looking back four years later, we can see how this unprecedented shock brought about equally new responses, from lockdown measures and financial support to the astonishingly rapid development and deployment of vaccines. Two years after the pandemic’s onset, the world had started, fitfully and uncertainly, to return to something like normality. Global Expatriates tracks the differences between 2019 and 2022, showing how each country’s response affected resident expat populations in very different ways.

Countries whose lockdowns ended earlier or were less severe seem to have seen a quicker return to growth

The overall pattern is one of recovery: Finaccord estimates that there were 75.2 million expatriates in 2022, 9% higher than in 2019. This might suggest that growth was reduced but not reversed by the pandemic. However, it’s important to dig beneath the headline numbers.

Covid-19 was not the only shock to impact these figures: the mass exodus in 2022 caused by the conflict in Ukraine amounted to around six million people by the year’s end.* Excluding this huge group across Europe, global numbers between 2019 and 2022 look essentially flat, in stark contrast to the continuous rise of previous years. This static overall picture is of course the result of a dynamic reality: a combination of dramatically reduced arrivals, decisions to return home, and, in 2022, the beginnings of a return to movement.

Each country, and each expat population within that country, tells its own story. Countries whose lockdowns ended earlier or were less severe seem to have seen a quicker return to growth: Switzerland, for example, saw 10% growth between 2019 and 2022. 

By contrast, for countries like China, stringent controls remained well into 2022, and consequently the 2022 total of half a million resident expatriates was almost half the number seen in 2019.

Covid-19, officially labelled a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020, was an unprecedented shock in the age of mobility

Both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – the largest destination countries Finaccord has studied with over eight million expatriates resident in each – proved resilient, with growth between 2019 and 2022, but the US, the third largest destination in 2019, had fallen to fourth in 2022, behind Germany. In the case of the US, reduced movement during the pandemic (and in particular a fall in ‘snowbirds’ – temporary winter residents from Canada) exacerbated a pre-existing decline.

Finaccord’s figures also show how Covid-19 changed the landscape in terms of types of expat. International students appear to have put their plans on hold more than they cancelled them, producing pent-up demand: the numbers bounced back relatively quickly in many countries, with the UK in particular seeing dramatic growth between 2019 and 2022. The global total hit 7.8 million in 2022, higher than the 7.2 million seen in 2019. By contrast, for corporate and other transferees, a recovery was not yet evident by 2022: numbers fell from 0.92 to 0.85 million. Finaccord does not forecast a full recovery for this ‘classic’ type of expatriate: by disrupting movement and promoting ways of remote working and meeting, the pandemic exacerbated existing trends towards localisation and away from long-term expatriate postings.

On the broadest level, Finaccord’s data shows that the pandemic was a disruption, not a change in direction

A disruption to mobility

On the broadest level, then, Finaccord’s data shows that the pandemic was a disruption, not 
a change in direction: the age of mobility moves on. But diving into the details also reveals a diversely impacted and changed landscape, shaped not only by Covid-19 but also by conflicts and political developments.

International health insurers, travel insurers, and others providing services for expatriates would do well to study this landscape – and to be ready for whatever shocks the future may have in store. Normal is no longer a guarantee.

*Finaccord’s expatriate figures exclude the large numbers of asylum seekers and refugees worldwide whose status is undetermined, but those displaced from Ukraine were fast-tracked through new visa schemes. Though less impactful in terms of total numbers, arrivals from Hong Kong also spiked dramatically in several countries.