Martina Tazzioli (Goldsmiths) and Maurice Stierl (Warwick University)
“We Closed the Ports to Protect Refugees.”
Hygienic Borders and Deterrence Humanitarianism during Covid-19
Abstract: This article investigates how the security-humanitarian rationale that underpins migration governmentality has been restructured by and inflected in light of hygienic-sanitary borders which enforce racialised confinement in the name of both migrants' and citizens' safety from infection by Covid-19. Focusing
on the politics of migration containment along EUrope's frontiers, examining in particular border reinforcements carried out by Italy, Malta and Greece, we interrogate how the pandemic has been exploited to enact
deterrence through hygienic-sanitary border enforcements. These enforcements are underpinned by an ambivalent security-humanitarian narrative that crafts migrants as subjects who cannot be protected by EU
member states from the pandemic if allowed inside, and, at once, as potential vehicles of contagion - ‘Corona
spreaders’ - and thus as dangers on a bacterial-hygienic level. Our article demonstrates that these EUropean
border measures are more than temporary responses to an unprecedented health crisis. Rather, the pandemic
has been seized as an opportunity to strengthen existing deterrence measures and hamper migrants' access
to asylum through biopolitical and spatial tactics that aim to restructure the border regime. While emphasising the historical trajectories and continuities underwriting these current developments, we contend that the
pandemic functions as an accelerator of dynamics of migrant incarceration and containment.
Introduction
In April 2020, in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, Italy and Malta declared their ports ‘unsafe’,
suggesting that migrants rescued in the Mediterranean Sea could not be disembarked. Officially, both Italy and Malta’s declarations of ‘unsafety’ were presented as measures meant to
protect not only Italian and Maltese citizens, but also the migrants themselves by preventing
them from being exposed to health risks in EUrope.i Thus, not merely throughout EUrope’s
Schengen zone but also at its external maritime frontiers, border closures have become enforced in the name of hygienic-sanitary protective measures (Human Rights Watch, 2020a).
The decision of EU member states to refuse to disembark migrants for their own good accentuates a relevant shift, this article suggests, in humanitarian-security discourses and rationales
on unauthorised migration and people seeking asylum. Indeed, in the context of a global health
emergency, migrants in distress in the Mediterranean Sea have become viewed not merely as
dangers, in the sense of potential criminals or terrorists, neither simply as victims to be saved.
Rather, migrants are increasingly depicted as those who have to be contained ‘elsewhere’ outside of EUrope or confined within - for their own well-being and safety given that they
could not be protected by EUropean countries struggling to combat a pandemic and as they
themselves could be vehicles of contagion. In this way, EUrope is actively turning itself not
merely into a hostile but also into an unsafe and risky environment, supposedly unable to take
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