Race, Rootedness and the Geographies of Sanctuary During the Pandemic

During a crisis, like the COVID-19 pandemic, there seems to be an instinctive turn towards sanctuary and roots. In 2020, repatriation flights and exceptions from travel restrictions allowed particular categories of travelers to return home. But our ideas about sanctuary are also restrictive, implicitly leaning on often racialized assumptions about movement, people and places. By analyzing how we imagine race and rootedness, we could better understand the exclusivity of a sanctuary in a crisis like the pandemic.

In February 2020, an outbreak of COVID-19 on the Diamond Princess cruise drew international attention as one of the biggest outbreaks outside of mainland China. When a passenger tested positive after disembarking in Hong Kong, the Diamond Princess went under a two-week quarantine at sea, just beyond Japanese territory. In a way, the passengers and the crew were country-less. So, where did the responsibility for the safety of the passengers and crew on board fall?

In the following weeks, national governments organized the repatriation of their citizens onboard the Diamond Princess. They were rescued from quarantine – not strictly by priorities such as medical need, but by their nationality and the capability of governments to organize charter flights to return them home. British nationals waited for over a week after more than three hundred US nationals were evacuated. In some cases, passengers with dual nationality risked losing priority in either government’s return policy. Critically, the crew working on the ship, who were mostly Filipino, Indian or Indonesian, were some of the last to be evacuated. This was despite them being widely exposed to the virus by continuing their work even after the forced quarantine onboard. Precarious contracts and competition for their jobs meant that many reportedly did not speak out of fear of retaliation.

Locating Sanctuary

Later in 2020, the repatriation operations from the Diamond Princess would preclude a global-scale effort by many countries to return stranded citizens “home.” In doing so, the pandemic revealed a well-worn tendency in the international migration regime to root people to particular places by allowing some but not others to return “home” at a time of high uncertainty and vulnerability. The COVID-19 evacuation and repatriation operations show how we imagine specific places as secure or dangerous, but that this risk mapping is not strictly objective, nor is the ability to move between danger and sanctuary equally enjoyed.

Although citizenship or residency offers very real privileges in times of crisis, such as access to healthcare and social security, as a condition for repatriation these criteria are too narrow and state-centric to acknowledge many of the reasons why a place might be “home” or “sanctuary.” Familial ties, relationships and caring needs were often found lacking as substantive reasons in themselves to qualify for repatriation. In the later stages of the pandemic, in order to be exempted from border restrictions, travel history and citizenship still took precedence over other reasons connecting people to places associated with home or sanctuary.

Migration, Rootedness and Race

As well as questioning the importance of roots, to focus on contesting state-based policies during crises draws attention to how race and other socio-economic categories appear in practice. For example, why was it that on the Diamond Princess cruise, the paying passengers were sorted and prioritized over the crew? What role did race play in this migrantization/citizenization of the crew and passengers ? What were the processes that justified why one group’s claims to safety were granted as citizens, but the crew were categorized and treated as migrant workers, and made to continue working until the passengers were evacuated? Throughout the pandemic, the ubiquitous exclusion of certain categories of people on the move from repatriation and entry was frequently called out. Migrant workers in several Gulf states were stranded without pay or adequate quarantine facilities, while waiting to return. In the UK, US or Australia, for example, refugee resettlement programs resumed far later than other forms of business or leisure travel. Migrant workers who did return to their countries of origin were later ‘stuck’ at home and unable to return to employment overseas – a dynamic that also makes us question the salience of rootedness and sanctuary.

In the international migration regime, the practice of associating sanctuary with national identity, and migration status is sometimes implicitly, but often violently racialized. Arboreal metaphors such as roots and soil describing “where we are from” suggest a natural association between people and places. The question of roots, argues the anthropologist Lisa Malkki, has long had a territorializing effect on citizenship, national identity and migration. While more often made visible during events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, taken-for-granted concepts such as sanctuary and roots do not always lead to a connoted peacefulness and can have rather deeply unequal and divisive effects on people on the move.

Eloise Thompson is a Doctoral researcher at the nccr – on the move and the University of Neuchâtel. She is part of the project “Towards a Novel Mobility Regime? The Legacies of the COVID-19 Pandemic Regarding the Governance of Human Movement”.

References:

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-Cornwell, Alexander. 15/04/20, “RPT-Gulf’s migrant workers left stranded and struggling by coronavirus outbreak,” Reuters. Accessed 6/2/23.
-Dahinden, Janine. 12/05/20, “The Migrant-Citizen Nexus in View of the Coronavirus Pandemic: Can We De-Migranticize Responses?” Nccr – on the move, Blog. Accessed 20/01/23.
-Malkki, L. (1992). National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees. Cultural Anthropology, 7(1), 24–44.
-Patton, Elaina.  11/03/20, “The High-Risk Work of a Cruise-Ship Crew Member Under Coronavirus Quarantine,” The New Yorker. Accessed 20/01/23.
-Socheath, Sar.  12/1/21, “Returning migrant workers desperate for jobs,” Khmer Times. Accessed 6/2/23.