New Vulnerabilities for Migrants and Refugees in State Responses to the Global Pandemic, COVID-19

Abstract

This article examines the global pandemic, COVID-19, through the lens of responses to vulnerable migrants, asking what state responses mean for the future of human rights values and for humanitarian interventions. The responses of the Australian state are developed as a case study of actions and policies directed at refugees and temporary migrant workers through the COVID-19 pandemic. The theoretical framing of the article draws on racial capitalism to argue that the developments manifest during the ‘crisis times’ of COVID-19 are in large part a continuity of the exclusionary politics of bordering practices at the heart of neoliberal capitalism. The article proposes that a rethinking of foundational theoretical and methodological approaches in the social sciences are needed to reflect contemporary changes in justice claims, claims that increasingly recognize the multi-species nature of existential threats to all life.

Necropolitics as accumulation: Enforcement and enclosure in Brisbane during COVID-19

“…A ‘pillar of settler colonialism,’ the incarceration of migrants and Aboriginal Australians continues colonial projects of ‘classification, extraction, extermination, confinement and control’ ( Nethery, 2021 , p. 8). Claudia Tazreiter and Metcalfe (2021 , p. 2) draw on these understandings to show how the histories of racial capitalism ‘remain embedded in value systems across societies and are expressed and manifest in the exclusions and vulnerabilities faced by many migrants.’ In their research, Kate Coddington (2017b) points out that the governance of migrants and Indigenous Australians is deeply entangled. Similar logics of containment are applied by prisons and borders toward populations on the edges of citizenship and national belonging: Indigenous people, racialized migrant groups, and others.…”

Sociological Perspectives of Migrant Health Disparities and Access to Healthcare Services during and beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic: Voices of Immigrant and Refugee Women in Greece

“…Racism impacts them mentally and physically and is deeply embedded in societies creating inequities in access to a range of social and economic benefits (Berman & Paradies, 2010;Campani, 2019). Racial and ethnic groups in the EU experience higher rates of ill health, including COVID-19 infection (Tazreiter & Metcalfe, 2021;Krieger, 2020;Su & Shen, 2020],…”

A Southern Feminist Approach to the Criminology of Mobility

“…There needs to be further research on how discrimination and marginalisation may not only lead to a person's imprisonment in their own country but may also be the cause of their migration-thereby creating a further risk of detention/imprisonment in the destination country. Vulnerabilities around cross-border mobilities have become increasingly complex with the rhetorical linking of immigration to national security in neoliberal states, economic crises and zoonotic infections like COVID-19 (Tazreiter and Metcalfe 2021). A historically connected and situated intersectional approach to the ontology of the criminology of mobility sets the premise for its Southern feminist epistemological and methodological formulations.…”

“…The vulnerabilities of migrants are heightened when they reach a destination country and are confronted with racism and inequity in access to state services. Refugees and migrants on temporary visas are at the receiving end of exclusionary politics of border practices and do not receive the same human services support and economic benefits as citizens (Tazreiter and Metcalfe 2021). Socio-economic vulnerabilities pave the pathways to prison for different categories of migrants, foreign nationals, long-term residents and second-generation migrants.…”