A Sudden Bankruptcy of Mobility Capital? The Paradoxical Effects of Pandemics on Human Movement
Between February and March 2020, many people accustomed to being highly mobile witnessed a massive curtailing of their right to travel both across and within countries. Among these measures were suppression of flights, closure of borders, banning of international student exchanges, halting of public transportation, lock-down of entire cities, freezing of posted army members, and prevention of people from going to work, school, religious ceremonies and sport events. But what do these disruptions tell us about human movement? Do they reverse or rather further reinforce inequalities?
Since its first appearance in December 2019, COVID-19 spread thousands of kilometers away from the clusters where it first originated. At the time of writing, the virus has reached all inhabited continents on earth. Viral diseases travel with people: it is through mobility practices (commuting, tourism, trade connections) and mobility instruments (airplanes, ships, trains) that the virus can travel from Wuhan to Milan, Paris or Zurich.
In theory, then, anything that reduces human mobility should help to break down the chain of the contagion. This is why COVID-19 brought about an external shock to long-established patterns of movement. Isolation is currently at the very top of most governments’ containment strategies. After years of talking about migration crises, the world is now facing a serious crisis of mobility.
This crisis consists of a significant disruption of “mobility capital”, that is the “unequally shared ability to be mobile again when it appears worthwhile to be so” (Moret, 2017). Being in control of when and how to be on the move depends on many resources: one’s passport, financial capital, social connections, knowledge, ethnicity and gender. The measures taken by governments to limit the spread of the virus significantly reduce the value of some of these resources.
Restrictions on Mobility Resources
The political responses to the outbreak of COVID-19 led to a sudden freezing of the mobility assets of many individuals. Italian tourists, for example, who were denied entry into Mauritius, complained that “they were treated like packages”. Currently, millions of people in China, France, Italy, and Spain live under a curfew and are forbidden to leave cordoned areas. Over one-hundred countries have closed their borders to some or all foreign travellers in the last three weeks, with a sharp acceleration over the last few days.
These measures pose serious issues. International organisations worry that they will have an impact on ‘global talent mobility’. People in quarantined areas complain that their rights are flagrantly ignored. As experience has shown, some end up trying to avoid detection at all cost, for instance, by taking connecting flights without informing authorities of their routes, by masking symptoms, by lying about recent travel or, simply, by breaking the cordon sanitaire. When the SARS spread in North America, the city of Toronto established a quarantine that, by the city’s own estimates, was followed by only 57 percent of the residents. The night after the announcement that the Italian government would impose a quarantine on Lombardy, there was a mass exodus of residents towards other regions of the country.
In spite of these problems, governments justify restrictions on mobility by claiming it is their duty to protect their citizens. On 10 February, the British government implemented a new emergency law that allows for the lawful detention of anyone who is reasonably suspected of posing a risk of infecting others with a serious disease. Similar legislation has been approved in Australia, Canada, and the US. Those violating the rules may face fines or imprisonment.
In a way, these developments can be seen as powerful equalizers of mobility capital. People who previously had plenty of mobility capital now have less. Such loss does not necessarily lead to bankruptcy, because this capital can be mobilised again the moment the restrictions are lifted.
Some Mobility Resources Matter More Than Ever
Certain resources contributing to people’s ability to be mobile – such as citizenship, money, and personal connections – have gained even more value precisely because of the current state of emergency. Nationality made it possible for many people to escape from the areas most violently affected by the disease. One’s residence status also proved to be discriminatory in the context of the travel bans. People living in New Zealand with a work visa, for instance, who were temporarily in China, were denied return into the country, while New Zealand citizens and permanent residents were let in, under the condition that they self-isolate for two weeks
Other mobility resources, like money and personal connections, remain crucial. In the eighteenth century, Elizabeth I of England decided to contain the Black Death issuing a law that stated that an outsider wishing to enter the city could do so only if they possessed a “special certificate” – an item usually reserved for the very wealthy. Today, again, money and personal ties can sometime bypass travel restrictions imposed by governments to limit the spread of the virus. Privileged individuals are only marginally affected by restrictions on mobility; some can elude ordinary travel channels by using private jets instead of commercial flights, others are free to decide not to move to protect their own safety. Paradoxically, the fact that some can work from home implies that others take their place by having to move and thus are exposing themselves to the virus: specialized doctors, but also fixers, gig workers, cleaners, and private nurses.
Those With Little Mobility Capital May Have Even Less
Meanwhile, people who have little money, poor personal connections, and the ‘wrong’ nationality are subjected to mobility restrictions even if they are unlikely to spread COVID-19. After all, quarantines have historically targeted immigrants. During the Black Death in the 14th century, Jewish people across Europe were tortured and killed (Cohn, 2007). In the US moreover, there is “a persistent association of immigrants and disease” (Markel & Stern, 2002).
Today, some measures are being taken on the basis of ethnicity only in complete disregard of the actual risk of contagion. In Bolivia, for example, three Japanese tourists were quarantined in a hospital, despite having never been to China, nor exhibiting any symptoms of the infection. Because of the racism and xenophobia that accompanies the spread of a virus, some minorities might self-restrict their movement in an attempt to become less visible and to avoid being accused of the infection. In China, the estimated one million Uighur Muslims are being held in close, unhygienic detention camps in Xinjiang, in conditions where the virus may evolve into an especially deadly form. Similarly, asylum seekers stuck on the border between Mexico and the US, or in Greece’s infamous camps, cannot follow the most basic measures to contain the virus due to overcrowding and lack of clean water. Should volunteers be prevented from moving across the border because of quarantine measures and travel restrictions, the asylum seekers would risk of no longer having access to food or other supplies.
Indeed, governments have introduced several restrictions to migration in an attempt to contain the crisis with border closures and prohibitions on arrivals from certain regions. The fear of a pandemic allowed a further curtailing of migration from Niger with the shutdown of humanitarian corridors. Calls for closing borders to migrants coming from African countries have grown louder, and so have proposals to shut down the Schengen area of free movement. These developments are truly worrying. Countries such as Libya or Niger are among the most isolated places in the world because of the scarcity of planes, trains, or ships. This isolation makes it unlikely that they are virus hotbeds and demonstrates the unequal mobility capital available for individuals.
Mobility Capital: Access Postponed Until Further Notice?
On the short run, quarantine comes as a premium for companies like Deliveroo and Netflix – it certainly does not for our social and relational habits. On the long run, a completely immobilized system would leave people starving and could spur riots. If employees cannot show up to work, for example, then they cannot produce medicines. It is not by chance that mayors, like Giuseppe Sala in Milan, have taken to the social media to claim that ‘the city won’t stop moving’. Sooner or later, governments will lift some of the restrictions on mobility that they have imposed. Should this mobility crisis be seen as an opportunity to rethink the way we move?
Invasive restrictions on human movement might change some habits. More and more people are working remotely (even in the public administrations), academics are cutting down on their participation in international conferences, the aviation industry is reporting huge losses. Some of these changes are bringing unexpected consequences. The mobility lockdown has produced the effects that years of climate negotiations had failed to achieve: cutting down the emissions. In a way, restrictions on mobility might show the most privileged people, precisely those whose highly mobile lifestyles may well have contributed more than others to the spread of the virus, how crucial movement is. These people, including many Europeans, could experience how much of a violation of freedom all restrictions of movement can be.
At the moment this remains at best dubious. While emotions run high when reports of the spread of the virus in Europe and North America are covered by the media, deaths in the Mediterranean are a banal subject and receive, therefore, very little media attention. Those who started the year 2020 with little mobility capital might find themselves with even less at the end of the year; while the privileged mobility capitalists can just wait until this crisis is over to resume life as usual.
Lorenzo Piccoli is the Scientific Officer of the nccr – on the move. He also works as a Research Associate for GLOBALCIT at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies in Florence. Joëlle Moret is a lecturer and a researcher in migration and mobility at the University of Neuchâtel.
References
– Cohn, S. K. (2007). The black death and the burning of Jews. Past and Present, 196(1), 3–36. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtm005
– Markel, H., & Stern, A. M. (2002). The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigrants and Disease in American Society. Milbank Quarterly, 80(4), 757–788. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0009.00030
– Moret, J. (2017). Mobility capital: Somali migrants’ trajectories of (im)mobilities and the negotiation of social inequalities across borders. Geoforum, (November), 0–1. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.12.002
