“This is not about immigration. What is transpiring right now is purely about infectious disease and public health,” insisted Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection,[1] when debating reporters in early April.
Since the beginning of the coronavirus fear wave, even before the World Health Organization considered it a global threat, activists for Asian and Asian-American rights were pointing out that xenophobic attacks were happening throughout the United States against people perceived as “Chinese”[2] and, therefore, potential coronavirus transmitters.
Attacks against immigrant – or “immigrant-looking” – citizens before covid-19 “became” the massive systemic problem that it is show that migration and protection, or, at least, the sensation of protection, are always connected.
The history of diseases frequently accompanies xenophobia and attacks against immigrants. The 1892 cholera pandemic was at the center of disinformation campaigns against the United States receiving groups (caravans, even) of Eastern European Jewish migrants. The same happened with Chinese immigrants during the 1900 bubonic plague outbreak in San Francisco.[3] Along with the stigmatization of the LGBTQ population, the AIDS pandemic was accompanied by the labeling of Haitians as a special high-risk category for the disease[4] – a judgment based solely on nationality.
As covid-19 evolved from an epidemic into a pandemic, discussions about xenophobia and racism were left aside as the perception of it being “everyone’s problem” increased. Now, countries like Germany, Spain, Italy and New Zealand are reclaiming a resemblance of “normal life” as countries like Brazil, Russia and Turkey are only in the beginning of what looks like an uphill battle against anti-science governments, underfunded public health systems and overwhelming underreporting of covid-related deaths.
Putin visits a coronavirus ward in a Russian Hospital – (Reuters)
The United States, despite being the country with the most coronavirus cases in the world, seems to be narratively set apart from those “underdeveloped” nations despite its appalling covid statistics and highly incoherent governmental policy strategy to combat the virus. The same country that drowns exceptionally deep in conspiracy theories about the disease is also at the forefront of potentially producing vaccines with ample industrial infrastructure to distribute a cure around the world.
In September 2019, Donald Trump addressed the UN general council saying: “When you undermine border security, you are undermining human rights and human dignity. Many of the countries here today are coping with the challenges of uncontrolled migration. Each of you has the absolute right to protect your borders.”[5]
A few months later, in a changed world, it is important to return to the concept of xenophobia and its intimate ties to the sensation of protection. In a modernity defined by constant reminders of the threat imposed by infections, what does it mean to protect borders? And protect from whom or what?
In 1985, a twenty-nine-year-old Haitian social worker named Marcelle Fortune was refused as a tenant by a landlord who was afraid she could spread AIDS throughout the building (KRAUT, p. 8, 1994).
I started this text wanting to talk about Trump’s definition of open borders, but the current scenario changes the weight of the president’s words. If he already spoke of and to migrants as viruses – “you will not be released into our country” – now, in times of high-anxiety and economic insecurity, it is an obligation to stay vigilant about health concerns being “not about migration.” It always is.
When some of the most important players in the political landscape confine a complex reality into an in-group versus out-group mentality, protecting the nation immediately becomes a matter of closing borders.
That international affairs strategy is replicated by civilians, who see it as their right to protect themselves against an external, theoretically invisible, threat. The menace becomes visible once it gains a name, a face, an origin. As the United States and other nations across the globe grieve for the consequences of the pandemic and the many lives lost, it is important to remember Marcelle Fortune and so many others throughout history who became the face of a “faceless” enemy. As lives are lost and panic ensues, immigrants’ lives are impacted whether they contract the virus or not.
Open borders is a valuable concept for anti-immigration advocates because it is an empty idea, fluctuating as the scene changes. With a health-related twist, the idea of open borders for the Trump administration might change once again, now signifying countries who have not “stepped up against the covid threat” in a narrative that frames the current president as a hero who is only giving the nation its sacred patriotic right to fight for its territory.
Cover photo by Sérgio Lima/AFP
Sources
Grmek, MD. ed. History of AIDS: Emergence and Origin of a Modern Pandemic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 1990.
Kraut AM. Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace.” New York: Basic Books; 1994.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/09/politics/southern-border-coronavirus/index.html
[2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/covid-19-fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-xenophobia-worldwide
[3] 59 Nordic J. Int’l L. 186 (1990) The Right to Freedom of Movement and the (Un)Lawfulness of AIDS/HIV Specific Travel Restrictions from a European Perspective. Available at: https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/nordic59&div=20&id=&page=
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/1983/07/31/us/debate-grows-on-us-listing-of-haitians-in-aids-category.html