What Tourism Can Teach Us About Migration

I lived in Lisbon for a few months in 2019, right in the thick of the city's overtourism moment. The neighborhood I rented in had this specific exhausted quality to it — locals who'd clearly rehearsed their irritation with Airbnb guests asking for restaurant recommendations, shop owners who'd pivoted their entire inventory toward people who'd leave in a week. The resentment was real. But so was my rent being covered by the sublet on my flat back home, paid by a tourist.

I thought about that when I watched Prof. Alexis Papathanassis — tourism researcher, rector of Bremerhaven University of Applied Sciences, and self-described "cosmo proletarian" — give a TEDx talk that quietly reframes one of the most politically loaded topics in Europe.

His argument, which sounds almost too tidy until you let it sit: tourism and migration are the same phenomenon, and we've spent decades learning to manage one while screaming at the other.

Papathanassis opens by establishing himself as a migrant — international student, expat in Kenya, worker for a German tourism conglomerate. "I was traveling to work," he says plainly. "The majority of them are similar to me." The "them" is the approximately 281 million migrants worldwide, a figure from the UN's International Organization for Migration (their most recent count, as of 2020 — it's likely higher now). Most migrate for work. Most do so temporarily. Most move within regions, not from poor countries to rich ones, which is the version of migration that tends to animate political speeches.

Then he lines up the economics, and I want to be upfront that some of these numbers are his, not independently established: he puts the global economic contribution of migration at $6.7 trillion, though this figure doesn't appear in standard World Bank or IOM datasets — treat it as his projection, not settled consensus. The World Bank does confirm that migrant remittances hit roughly $647 billion in 2021, which is real money flowing from workers back to families. Papathanassis frames this as "three times what the EU spends on unemployment benefits" — the comparison is attention-grabbing but also a bit apples-and-oranges, since remittances are private transfers and benefit spending is a public category. He knows it's a provocation: "Next time you're worried about a migrant stealing your job — don't worry. They're going to be paying your benefit."

The tourism numbers are similarly large. He cites a $9.5 trillion global economic contribution from tourism and claims that tourist spending alone could theoretically cover two-thirds of European pension costs — a striking figure he doesn't source, so file that under his analysis rather than verified data. The broader point, though, is hard to argue with: both sectors are economically enormous, both are politically treated as problems to contain, and one of them has a twenty-year body of management research behind it.

This is where the talk gets genuinely useful.

Papathanassis has spent his career studying overtourism — why some places feel overrun and others don't, why residents sometimes turn on the visitors their local economy depends on. What the research consistently shows, he argues, is that the anger is rarely actually about the number of tourists. It's localized to hotspots, it's seasonal, and — here's the part that lands — it correlates strongly with corruption. Places where tourism revenue is well-distributed and transparently managed don't tend to produce anti-tourism protests. Places where the money pools at the top, where city planning fails, where locals feel like they're absorbing all the costs and none of the benefits — those are the places that develop the sentiment.

"Whether a community benefits from tourism or not correlates very strongly with corruption," he says. "The better we get at managing it — meaning we have less systemic corruption — the more benefits we get from it."

I've thought about this dynamic a lot, actually, in a different context. So much of what gets diagnosed as a crisis — burnout, loneliness, disengagement — turns out, on closer inspection, to be a management problem wearing a crisis costume. The crisis framing is useful to someone, usually whoever benefits from people feeling helpless rather than demanding better systems. The overtourism research suggests this pattern isn't unique to the self-help space.

Ask whether your city has a migrant problem or a housing policy problem and you get very different policy responses. One ends in border theatrics. The other ends in infrastructure investment and functional local governance — unglamorous, undramatic, and apparently what actually works.

The measures Papathanassis identifies as effective: distributing tourist flows across time and geography to reduce seasonal hotspots, investing in carrying capacity, and — critically — involving local communities in decision-making rather than having policy handed down from above. The measures that don't work: border controls, price barriers designed to keep people out, and politicians using public anger as a distraction from their own failures. "Politicians are scapegoating tourists," he says, "in order to divert attention from the real problems and the compounded failure of all kinds of policies with regards to the economic architecture of their cities and regions."

The analogy to migration is direct and deliberate. He's not saying the situations are identical. He's asking why we've developed sophisticated, evidence-based management frameworks for one form of human mobility and responded to the other mostly with walls, wedge issues, and vibes.

His closing move is the one I keep turning over. He asks the audience to imagine arriving somewhere as a tourist — you've saved up, you're excited, you're ready — and being met with signs telling you to leave, locals who expect you to thank them for sharing their space. Then: "Why should a migrant think different?"

I'll be honest: when I first heard that, I felt the tug of the critique — isn't this just laundering a political argument through a hospitality metaphor? Aren't there meaningful differences between someone on a two-week holiday and someone who intends to settle, access public services, reshape a community? Yes. Those differences are real and Papathanassis doesn't fully grapple with them. The analogy has weight but it also has limits, and the talk would be stronger for naming them.

But then I kept thinking about why the analogy is discomfiting in the first place. A tourist is someone we extend welcome to almost automatically. A migrant is someone we've spent decades training ourselves to view with suspicion. The uncomfortable question isn't whether they're the same. It's why we extend warmth to one and not the other — and whether the answer to that question says more about us than about either of them.

"Hospitality will become prosperity," he says at the end. "Humanity is prosperity." As a thesis it's a little smooth, but I don't think he's wrong.

What I take from this talk isn't a policy position — it's a diagnostic lens. When a place starts resenting its visitors, the visitors probably aren't the whole story. When a country frames its relationship with migrants as a crisis, worth asking: what isn't being managed? What's being scapegoated? Who's actually benefiting from the panic?

Those questions don't resolve neatly. But I'd rather sit with them than mistake the loudest part of a problem for the whole thing.

— Ellis Redmond