What can tourism teach us about migration? | Alexis Papathanassis | TEDxHochschuleBremerhaven

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]The world is your oyster.

[00:00:03]I learned this expression when I was learning English as a foreign language and people kept telling me the world is your oyster. And I was wondering what this meant. I never understood this obsession with seafood. However, eventually I realized it's probably a metaphor and it probably means that the world is small and if you explore it, you'll find maybe a purr or two. And I took this very seriously. So, I started traveling and I became a so-called cosmo proletarian. What does that mean? Well, first of all, as you can see also in the pictures, I took the whole thing about the seafood very seriously and I ate a lot. But, uh, I started as an international student and I decided to go somewhere abroad. Beautiful experience. Then I decided to go and work as an expat in Kenya where again I had another interesting experience. And then eventually I came to work for a big tourism conglomerate in Germany again international as an international worker and I realized it was so much fun going to different cultures experiencing different cultures learning it was exhilarating and I thought I want more of this. So occasionally I became a very passionate tourist. So you might think well am I alone with this? No, there are plenty of us. 281 million migrants worldwide because this is what I was. I was traveling to work. The majority of them are similar to me. They travel to work and most of them on a temporary basis. So to give you an idea what this means, this is roughly the population of northern and central Europe.

[00:01:45]So the global population of migrants equals almost the population of northern and central Europe. Now you might think well yeah they always always people come from poor countries going to rich countries. This is not the case. A lot of the migration immigration immigration activity is taking place in the middle middle high middle upper and middle low income. So again your typical migrant is not the one you might imagine. Um now you might say well what's the point of this why are you giving us this data well fact is migration is an expression of human human mobility and as such it has a huge impact just to give you some simple ideas the economic contribution of migration globally amounts to 6.7 trillion dollars again maybe to give you a point of comparison this is the gross domestic product of the UK and France combined Remittances are basically what migrants send back home. They send money back home. A lot of those people work for their families. Now, this amounts to 647 billion dollars. Again, to give you something to compare with, this is three times the money the European Union spends on unemployment benefits. So, next time you're worried about a migrant stealing your job, don't worry. they're going to be paying your benefit. So, you might say, well, all pretty fine. Human mobility, people move around, they look for a better life, they obviously have a good impact on the economy. Where's the problem? And then you see something like this and say, well, could it be that migration is a social political disruption and you see protest. Now, you might think that those are migration protests or they're anti-migration protests, but they are not. Think again.

[00:03:38]Those are headlines from anti-ourism protests. And here out of the blue, I started thinking, well, I said, well, I've been researching tourism for quite a long time, and there's a lot of anti-ourism sentiment, so-called over tourism. And when I see those pictures, I said, well, I see the same thing in migration. Where do we draw the parallels? And it then came to me. I said, well, they're both phenomena of human mobility.

[00:04:04]And I was thinking, well, what does this mean? And if we look at tourism for example, you see something similar. You see the passionate tourist and we are talking about 1.3 billion trips per year tourists. That's roughly the population of China.

[00:04:20]And we can see that most of them are taking place domestically.

[00:04:24]Again, if we're talking about migrants, we are talking mostly about regional migration in terms as opposed to international. What does tourism mean economically?

[00:04:35]Well, we see um economic contribution of $9.5 trillion.

[00:04:42]$9.5 trillion equates. And now this is why I'm bringing Germany into the equation. The GDP of Germany, UK, and the Netherlands combined. If we look at tourism receipts, which is basically what what money tourists spend, we're talking about $1.4 trillion.

[00:05:00]This would be enough to finance around about 2/3 of the European pension costs.

[00:05:08]So we're talking about big numbers and then you know you go on holiday and say well human mobility I'm good for the economy. Why do I see something like this?

[00:05:19]So you can go and travel to southern Europe and you can see for example everywhere this kind of protest silent and sometimes loud and uh you know tourists should f off because they're destroying a place and uh actually they did during the pandemic the tourists effed off and they stayed home. How did that work out for us? Well a bit of some numbers here. You see different countries. You can see for example how tourism was affected the balance between domestic and international tourists tourism in different countries in Europe. And as you can see Europe as a whole was negatively affected. Who suffered the most? Basically the food and accommodation industries which employ a large number of people and incidentally a lot of migrants. So this didn't work out very well for us. Next question is what are we going to do about it? Well, we can get rid of all the tourists, but maybe they're just too many.

[00:06:22]Well, perhaps, but not everywhere. If you look at those maps, they basically show tourism density. Tourist density in terms of space. So, we're talking about bed nights per square kilometers. And we're talking about bed night per thousands of locals. So we are comparing the density of tourism over the continent over the European continent I use there for example and in terms of space and in terms of people and as you can see the more dark the more blue that's why we call it out of the blue I guess the more blue the the colors become the higher the density so by you don't need to look at the map of detail to realize that overcrowding having too many tourist tourists in a small area it's fairly localized and it doesn't correspond one to one to the places where we see the anti-ourism sentiment and if you look at terms of population you will see exactly the same picture.

[00:07:21]So in every case we know now that over tourism and anti-ourism sentiment is not a global issue it's a regional at best.

[00:07:31]So we're talking about hotspots. Could it be the same for migration? Could it be? Do we have a migration crisis or do we have a migration hotspot? Now the the lucky thing is that we've been studying overrusion for the last 20 years talking about myself and we have tried to understand where this phenomenon how this phenomenon actually work where does it come from and most importantly what we can do about it. So what have we learned so far? We have learned that first of all it's not a global issue.

[00:08:00]Actually, when you look globally, most countries, most regions want more tourists instead of less. Secondly, we notice that the hotspots usually come to urban areas and capitals. So we're suspecting there are a number of other issues in there that perhaps lead us to actually scapegoating blaming tourism for failures in terms of city planning and management of the whole city as a whole and the economic benefits. We also know that is seasonality. If I would show you this map that I showed you earlier in a different quarter of the year, let's say show to you in the winter period instead of the summer as I did here, that was the third quarter, then you would see actually practically no blue in there. So, it's a highly seasonal issue. Then we also know that those anti-ourist sentiments have a lot to do with so-called geographical and cultural proximity. To put it simple, this means that we are less likely to find to have a problem with tourists that look like us, behave like us, and hopefully don't come from too far away.

[00:09:08]What does this tell us about ourselves?

[00:09:10]And last but not least, and perhaps most importantly, what we found out through several studies is that whether a community benefits from tourism or not correlates very strongly with corruption. There's a measure of corruption. It's called the corruption index. So if you actually measure tourist income with a corruption index, you will see a very high correlation.

[00:09:31]This tells us again that we are obviously not good at managing it. And the better we get at managing it, meaning we have less systemic corruption, therefore more benefits we get from it. So what do we know now about to move forward? We're saying, okay, I got it. We don't we can we don't want to stop tourism. It's pretty good.

[00:09:50]It's not about too many tourists. It's about getting the right tourists. It's about getting the right migrants, is it? So, let me show you what works that we know from research and what doesn't. What works is trying to divert tourist flows both in space and in time, trying to reduce seasonality and divert them from the hotspots to a larger area.

[00:10:15]The other thing that we know has worked is investing in infrastructure. Okay, we're we're talking about carrying capacity. How much tourism can a destination carry? And there has been plenty of studies on this. Third, involving locals and local communities into the decision making, into policy making and of course educating the tourists. Those three measures have been proven to work over and over again. What has not been proven to work and actually has proven to be actually destructive is border controls and visa restrictions, access and price differentiation which I call which they call demarketing, antagonism which is what you see with different demonstrations and the anti-terrorist sentiment which is expressed and last but not least of course the whole political instrumentalization. politicians are scapegoating tourists in order to divert attention from the real pro problems and the compounded failure of all kinds of policies with regards to the economic architecture of their cities and regions. So my suggestion is instead of actually dealing with a a problem by screaming at it at a local level, why don't we actually try to deal with it where it happens locally and deal with it not by screaming at it but by managing it. It's a very simple idea which brings me to my final thought. Um we are in a world on the move. At the end of the day, everyone is traveling.

[00:11:49]Everyone is moving in order to find a better place under the sun. Imagine yourself. You're going as a tourist.

[00:11:55]You've worked very hard. You paid a lot of money and you go somewhere and you want to enjoy your holiday. Can you imagine that people don't want you there? Can you imagine that locals will expect you to thank to to expect you to thank them for allowing them to share the same space? Can you imagine them demonstrating against you? Why should a migrant think different?

[00:12:21]Everyone deserves their place under the sun. In addition to that, we live in a world where we need qualified personnel.

[00:12:30]We need we we are working in we we're living in experiential economy, especially in Europe. Services in Europe account for around 70% of the gross domestic product. Now if you are a qualified migrant or let's say a full pocketed tourist and you would see the signals I showed you earlier red do not do I'm signaling you're not welcome here against the signal well come here and we'll figure it out we'll manage it which is hospitality where would you choose to go especially if you have options so in our new world and this is my food for thought for today is what if we treated migrants as long-term tourists. So, we can learn a lot from tourism. And what if we treated tourists as temporary migrants?

[00:13:20]In which case, I believe that our hospitality would become prosperity.

[00:13:25]Humanity is prosperity. Let's not forget that. Thank you very much. [applause]