What is it about?

Tourism and migration are usually treated as different kinds of movement, but in reality they are closely connected. Tourism depends heavily on migrant workers, from hotel and restaurant employees to cruise ship staff and seasonal workers. At the same time, tourism can encourage migration by creating jobs and shaping people's ideas about opportunities elsewhere. This article asks two simple questions: What would tourism be without migration? And what would migration be without tourism? It argues that if we want tourism to become genuinely sustainable, we need to pay much more attention to the people whose mobility makes tourism possible, their working conditions, their ability to cross borders and the inequalities that determine who is free to move and who is not.

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Why is it important?

Debates about sustainable tourism often focus on environmental impacts and on tourists, while paying much less attention to the workers who keep tourism functioning. Yet global tourism could not operate at its current scale without a large and flexible migrant workforce, often employed in seasonal, relatively low-paid and insecure jobs. The article therefore brings social sustainability into the tourism-migration debate, highlighting questions of workers' rights, inequality and unequal access to mobility. The COVID-19 crisis made these inequalities particularly visible: tourists and migrant workers could encounter the same closed borders and disrupted transport systems but experience radically different consequences. More broadly, the article argues that resilience should not simply mean enabling the tourism industry to recover from crises while leaving existing inequalities untouched. Truly sustainable tourism requires coordinated policies that consider tourists, workers and local communities together, while recognizing that different destinations require context-specific solutions.

Perspectives

This article has a particularly personal dimension for me. My own family history is deeply intertwined with tourism and migration. My Flemish mother travelled to Spain as a tourist, where she met my Spanish father while he was working in hospitality. He later migrated to Belgium, and I grew up moving between different countries. Long before I began studying mobility as an anthropologist, then, tourism and migration were already connected in my own life. What continues to strike me is how differently we value different kinds of movement. A tourist crossing a border and a migrant worker crossing the same border may physically undertake a similar journey, but the freedom, rights and opportunities associated with those movements can be radically unequal. During my fieldwork, I repeatedly encountered people whose mobility was essential to tourism but whose own freedom to move was highly constrained. For me, this is why sustainability cannot only be about carbon emissions, protecting destinations or encouraging tourists to behave more responsibly. It also has to be about people, labour, mobility and social justice. If tourism relies on people moving across borders to serve those who travel for leisure, we need to ask much harder questions about whose mobility is encouraged, whose is restricted, who benefits and who carries the risks. Ultimately, I see the article as an invitation to put mobility itself at the centre of the sustainability debate. Human beings have always moved, but not everybody is equally free to do so. A more sustainable form of tourism therefore requires not only changing how tourists travel, but also paying attention to the conditions under which the people who make tourism possible are able, or compelled, to move.

Professor Noel B. Salazar
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

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This page is a summary of: Labour migration and tourism mobilities: Time to bring sustainability into the debate, January 2023, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003358282-9.
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