COVID Postscript
The COVID-19 outbreak has emphasized more than ever the question of how researchers can avoid reproducing the problematic and racialized representation of the “migrant” resulting from states’ efforts to prevent certain people’s mobilities. Recognizing how the national-scale perspective shapes and restricts our thinking, and starting by not differentiating between migrants and citizens, but rather using the analytical lens of the migrant-citizen nexus are important first steps in developing new approaches made urgent by the pandemic.
As I write, citizens of wealthy democracies are confined in ways that would have been unimaginable even one month ago. In England, no person may leave the place where they live ‘without a reasonable excuse.’ Leaving home for the purposes of ‘buying paint and brushes simply to redecorate a kitchen’ or ‘driving for a prolonged period with only brief exercise,’ for example, do not constitute acceptable reasons (College of Policing 2020). In the US, several states have introduced border checkpoints and are targeting motorists with out of state license plates. In Spain, the Guardia Civil have been given powers to check any documentation that can prove a person’s reason for being outside, including shopping receipts. These are the kinds of measures which non-citizens or citizens on probation may be familiar with but are extraordinary for most. They are compounded by the experience of a kind of an ‘asylum seeker time,’ an unrolling and flat present, a temporariness that extends for an unknown period, and over which people have limited control.
Global Versus National Perspectives
Public health is an instantiation of the ‘migrant-citizen nexus.’ It exposes the similarity among the members of our species, as the virus does not discriminate based on nationality or wealth. In that sense, ‘we are in this together.’ Yet a national perspective has been guiding the analysis of the pandemic and the responses to it. While the pandemic is global, the metaphors of being ‘at war,’ fighting and enlisting are promoted as if other humans were the enemies. In the UK, we watch the daily press briefings flanked by Union Jacks and Georgian paneling and listen to comparisons with other states, while the government seeks to explain the relative steepness of our ‘curve.’ In the early days, countries would refer smugly to their national cultures: “Italians’ demonstrative nature could be contributing to the spread of coronavirus.” “The lifestyle and diet of Myanmar citizens are beneficial against the coronavirus.” However, national thinking can be misleading and methodological denationalism has the potential to help us identify key issues that may be obscured if we overly focus on the national scale.
Firstly, thinking nationally suggests that those residing on the same territory are ‘in it together.’ Now of course, it is undeniable that the state in which people were at the time of the outbreak of the virus has direct consequences on their health. National governments are responding quite differently to the public health crisis, and their responses affect the rates of infection and mortality. However, the virus is also exposing the mechanisms that promote and maintain inequality within as well as between states. For example, in the UK, Sweden and the USA, among other countries, evidence is emerging that Black and Minority Ethnic people are disproportionately likely to catch and die from coronavirus. Increased susceptibility is in part because of poorer living conditions and long-term health inequalities, but also the likelihood of them working in ‘forward-facing’ and essential jobs. In the UK, the first ten named doctors to die from COVID-19 were all from minority ethnic backgrounds.
Inequalities According to Citizenship Status
These discrepant vulnerabilities and their association with race and class divisions are acknowledged, but citizenship status has so far been overlooked in reports and data on those who have caught and died from the virus. Non-citizens account for a substantial share of employment in many sectors that are now defined as essential. This includes health professionals: in Switzerland, 34% of doctors are non-citizens, in the UK, it is 28% (Baker 2019). Additionally, a report by the Migration Advisory Committee found that migrant nurses are paid significantly less than their UK national colleagues (Migration Advisory Committee 2016, Annex B).
The Origins of the Crisis
The legal restrictions that are part of ‘making up migrants’ are an essential element in the interaction between the socio-economic and the biological factors that has consequences for everyone’s public health. This interaction is key to the origin and spread of the virus, and prioritizing the national scale means that we miss how the multiple intersections of (im)mobilities of capital, food, humans, animals, and microbiological organisms have produced the contemporary situation. The COVID virus is a human infection of animal origin, and the outbreak is likely to have originated in a market selling dead and live wild animals as food. However, to see the virus as originating in China is to miss the powerful transnational forces at play because of the distraction of the national angle.
Across the world, multinational corporations have undermined local food security, pushing smallholders off their land and fisherfolk from their fishing grounds, increasing the cost of food and making subsistence more difficult. As the price of protein has risen, the urban poor have turned to ‘bush meat,’ and rural people have moved to land that is more difficult to cultivate, sometimes encroaching on areas previously uninhabited by human populations, exposing them to new animal harms. Factory farming has also driven the emergence of new diseases. The mass ‘production’ of livestock crowds together millions of farmed animals in breeding grounds for disease and species jumping (Wallace et al. 2020). Livestock production and multinational agribusiness are owned and controlled by a handful of multinational corporations – JBS, Tyson Foods, Cargill, and Smithfields (the last owned by the Chinese WH Group). Powerful transnational financial interests are also invested in them: for example, after the 2008 financial crisis, Goldman Sachs bought into Chinese poultry farms – reservoirs of avian flu. Methodological denationalism can help develop the kind of relational thinking that locates the origins of the crisis – and therefore its long term solutions – not in a single animal in a wet market in Wuhan, but in entanglements whose ‘knots’ are not only in Beijing and Hong Kong but also in New York, London and Paris.
Closing the Borders Against the Public Interest
This is particularly important in a situation where the virus is already being used as an excuse for brutal crackdowns. Border closures have been used to limit the spread of infectious diseases for centuries – the word ‘quarantine’ comes from the 14th-century Venetian practice of requiring ships from infected ports to sit at anchor for 40 days, “quaranta giorni in Italian,” before landing. In the contemporary world, it is a measure associated with strong government, with taking action to protect the nation. “This is why we need borders,” tweeted President Trump, directing attention to the borders and away from the internal community spread and chronic failures that facilitated it. Hungarian President Viktor Orban closed not only Hungary’s borders but also its universities on the grounds that ‘we cannot separate the tens of thousands of foreign students from the Hungarian students,’ inadvertently demonstrating a key slippage that nationalism facilitates: associating spread not with movement but with foreignness and ethnicity. The fact is that, in a globally integrated economy, international movement cannot be simply halted. This is illustrated by the continuing demand for temporary migrants to harvest crops across Europe in the Spring and Summer of 2020. The European Commission advised that agricultural workers be permitted to cross European borders while Germany, the UK, Italy and Spain desperately sought to recruit seasonal pickers. Movement, it seems, is necessary to ‘keep us safe, healthy and with food on the table.’
Milton Friedman wrote: ‘Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around’. Times like this expose how politicized judgments of reasonableness and realism are. A national lens normalizes strict mobility controls, hyper surveillance, and the ready association of race and disease; it distracts from the powerful financial and industrial interests that today shape the interface between the socio-economic and the biological spheres. Bizarrely, it makes preventing human movement more imaginable than planetary public health at a time when our energies should be devoted to the latter.
This blog is part of a wider debate between Bridget Anderson and Janine Dahinden that will be published 2021 in the Swiss Journal of Sociology 47(1).
Bridget Anderson is the Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship and member of the International Advisory Board of the nccr – on the move.
References:
– Anderson, Bridget (2019). New Directions in Migration Studies: Towards Methodological Denationalism, Comparative Migration Studies 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-019-0140-8.
– Baker, Carl (2019). NHS Staff from Overseas: Statistics. House of Commons Library Briefing Paper no. 7783 8th July.
– College of Policing (2020). What constitutes a reasonable excuse to leave the place where you live.
– Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) (2016). Partial Review of the Shortage Occupation List, Review of nursing.
– Wallace, Robert, Liebman, Alex, Chaves, Luis and Rodrick Wallace (2020). COVID-19 and circuits of capital. Monthly Review 72(1).
