COVID has made us realize that our social and economic system is more vulnerable to shocks than we had previously thought. Our societies need to think seriously about how we would handle a future crisis; governments will almost certainly have more thorough pandemic plans. But I suspect that we are overly prone to think that ‘the world will never be the same again’. Some pre-existing trends e.g. to online shopping and remote working are probably accelerated but we may be surprised by how quickly we go back to the old ways, good and bad. If the shape of our society is not fundamentally different, our immigration policy is unlikely to be very different either. But even if there is more of a change to improve resilience, the implications for immigration policy are likely to be small and quite nuanced, implying more openness in some areas, but less in others.