Labour migration and tourism mobilities: Time to bring sustainability into the debate

Migration and tourism are interconnected forms of human mobility, similar but different. It is impossible to draw neat boundaries around the two because they constantly intersect, sometimes within one and the same individual. Tourism and migration often fuel each other, thereby raising two interesting questions that are rarely asked, namely 'What would tourism be without migration?' and 'What would migration be without tourism?'. In significant ways, sustainability is directly related to the 'mobility' aspects of tourism-related labour. However, in tourism studies, research on mobility often focuses merely on tourist movements. In general, there has been little detailed examination of the mechanisms that comprise and (re)produce the border-crossing movements of tourism labourers. If there is little attention to tourism-related labour mobilities, considerations related to the sustainability implications of worker mobility are highlighted even less often. Indeed, despite the anthropocentric focus of sustainability as a concept, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the aspect of social sustainability. As the COVID-19 crisis shows, when it comes to the nexus between migration and tourism, the current and future challenges are huge.