It is not possible to use references in the string literals in migrations.

A typical use-case would be to have a Landing Page migration, where one or more blocks are using locationlist block attribute type. This attribute, when serialized to YAML, looks for instance like:

{ id: '1099', name: locationlist, value: '101, 102' }

Naturally, values should be replaced by references as these numeric values might change.

Unfortunately, neither:

{ id: '1099', name: locationlist, value: 'reference:foo, reference:bar' }

nor

{ id: '1099', name: locationlist, value: "'reference:foo', 'reference:bar'" }

works.