By dint of good luck and a night owl cousin, I happened to be awake in Paris the night of March 11, when Donald Trump announced—incorrectly, as it turned out—that he was closing the US border to all flights arriving from most European countries. I’d been in France on what was supposed to be a three-week fellowship, but even before Trump finished speaking, I rebooked a ticket and was in the air less than 12 hours later. I was lucky; Americans in Europe who weren’t up late that night ended up crammed into customs halls, where some of them likely acquired the SARS-CoV-19, the virus that causes Covid-19.1→Greg Miller, Josh Dawsey, and Aaron C. Davis, “One Final Viral Infusion: Trump’s Move to Block Travel from Europe Triggered Chaos and A Surge of Passengers from the Outbreak’s Center,” Washington Post, May 23, 2020.
→Sanya Mansoor, “‘A Hotbed for the Virus’: What Travelers Experienced Returning from Europe to Overwhelmed U.S. Airports,” Time, March 15, 2020. All this despite the fact that the virus was already firmly in the United States and it came when the Trump administration instead ought to have been taking firm public health measures to encourage social distancing while ramping up testing and contact tracing.2Nicole Narea, “Coronavirus Is Already Here. Blocking Travelers Won’t Prevent Its Spread,” Vox, March 14, 2020.
A pandemic is, by definition, global, or at least international “and over a wide area.”3Heath Kelly, “The Classical Definition of a Pandemic Is Not Elusive,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 89 (2011): 540–541. Yet disease transmission, medical treatment, and the social experience of disease are all necessarily local.4On the local—or at least national—contexts of global disease, see Mari Armstrong-Hough, Biomedicalization and the Practice of Culture: Globalization and Type 2 Diabetes (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). In that way, pandemics are like many other disasters. The Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 struck the coasts of 14 countries, and yet although the event was transnational, its effects were experienced in and shaped by specific national and local contexts. Or take the seemingly local event of a munitions ship exploding in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia in December 1917. Not only were the ships that collided internationally owned and bound for international locations, but the response to the disaster was shaped both by elite and working-class people and ideas that crossed and recrossed borders.5Jacob A.C. Remes, “‘Committed as Near Neighbors’: The Halifax Explosion and Border-Crossing People and Ideas,” American Review of Canadian Studies 45, no. 1 (March 2015): 26–43.
Pandemics and other disasters force us to think in different scales of time and space.6Scott Gabriel Knowles and Zachary Loeb, “The Voyage of the Paragon: Disaster as Method,” in Critical Disaster Studies: New Perspectives on Vulnerability, Resilience, and Risk, eds. Jacob A.C. Remes and Andy Horowitz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2021). See also Gabrielle Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 109–141. Covid-19, particularly the bungled US response to it, should encourage us to interrogate the construction, place, and logic of borders in US culture and society. To borrow a phrase from Canadian studies, we should understand the United States as a border nation.7About three-quarters of Canadians live within 100 miles of the border and nine-tenths live within 200 miles, and the border features prominently in Canadian culture and economics. The phrase appears to originate in Wayne C. Thompson, Canada 2001 (Harper’s Ferry, WV: Stryker-Post Publications, 2001), 14, but has been picked up widely. See, for instance, Stephen T. Moore, “Defining the ‘Undefended’: Canadians, Americans, and the Multiple Meanings Border during Prohibition,” American Review of Canadian Studies 34, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 3–32. After all, over 65 percent of Americans live within the 100-mile border zone claimed by the US Border Patrol for their activities (and even more if one includes airports as “borders,” as the Border Patrol might).8Tanvi Misra, “Inside the Massive U.S. ‘Border Zone’,” Citylab, May 14, 2018. For more on the border zone, see Elizabeth Cohen, Illegal: How America’s Lawless Immigration Regime Threatens Us All (New York: Basic Books, 2020). As Thomas Bollyky, director of the global health program at the Council on Foreign Relations, told a journalist when Trump issued his European travel ban, “Coronavirus knows no borders, but borders are the only thing that President Trump knows with regard to Covid-19.”9Narea, “Coronavirus Is Already Here.” What comes into focus when we use Covid-19 to consider the United States as a border nation? Conversely, what do we see about Covid-19 when we examine it in the context of the United States as border nation?
Covid-19 and immigration: Xenophobia as structuring logic
When describing the US response to Covid-19, especially that of the federal government, it is easy to fall back on words like “bungled,” “incompetent,” or “haphazard.” Yet those words usually connote randomness, as if the Trump administration’s response was simply absent.10I am grateful to Emily Pressman, whose question on Twitter helped me formulate these ideas. Instead, we must understand the Trump administration’s malign failures as structured by the ideology and policy goal that has motivated most of the administration: racist xenophobia.11Traditionally we have used the word “nativist” for this form of racist xenophobia, but I take Erika Lee’s argument that “nativism” obscures the dispossession of Indigenous peoples by declaring white Anglo-Saxons to be “native.” See Lee’s America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2019), esp. 11–12. From the first days of his administration—indeed, from the earliest days of his campaign for president—Trump’s first priority has been to end immigration.12Trump’s campaign announcement was when he made his infamous claim that “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.” The Muslim Ban was among his first acts as president. On the former, see Alexander Burns, “First Draft: Choice Words From Donald Trump, Presidential Candidate,” New York Times, June 16, 2015; on the latter, see “Timeline of the Muslim Ban,” ACLU of Washington. Indeed, for an administration largely characterized by bombastic bumbling, it has been in immigration that Trump has had his greatest successes because, as immigration reporter Dara Lind put it, he has been able to “push on the soft parts of the immigration system.”13See, e.g., Dara Lind, “Trump’s Stripping of Passports from Some Texas Latinos, Explained,” Vox, August 30, 2018; id., “Trump’s Administration Is a Horrifying Success: At Terrorizing Immigrants,” Vox, April 3, 2017. For a timeline of Trump administration immigration policies and initiatives, see “Timeline of Federal Policy on Immigration, 2017–2020,” Ballotopedia.
It is not surprising, then, that the few decisive actions the Trump administration has taken against Covid-19 have been to ban cross-border migration. For instance, Trump frequently heralds what he claims was an early and unpopular decision to ban travel from China. Yet, the travel ban did little to stop the spread of the virus to the United States, which arrived from Europe rather than China.14→Ana S. Gonzalez-Reiche et al., “Introductions and Early Spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the New York City Area,” Science 369, no. 6501 (2020).
→Matthew T. Maurano et al., “Sequencing Identifies Multiple, Early Introductions of SARS-CoV2 to New York City Region,” medRxiv (preprint, submitted April 2020). But the epidemiologic failure of the ban was also guaranteed because, in fact, it was not a travel ban. Nearly 40,000 people—mostly US citizens and long-term residents—entered the United States from China from the beginning of the “ban” to early April.15Steve Eder et al., “After Wuhan Disclosure, 430,000 Flew to the U.S.,” New York Times, April 5, 2020, A1. Trump’s goal was not to stop the virus but to stop Chinese people from entering the United States.
This antiforeigner logic pervaded the federal public health response to Covid-19.16For a similar point, see Vijay Prashad, “How the United States Government Failed to Prepare for the Global Pandemic,” CounterPunch, May 21, 2020. In one of the most crucial failures, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) rejected the German-designed, global standard test approved by the World Health Organization (WHO), preferring a Made in America solution. The US test, it turned out, did not work, but the federal government continued to refuse to approve foreign tests.17Michael D. Shear et al., “Testing Blunders Cost Vital Month in U.S. Virus Fight,” New York Times, March 29, 2020, A1; see also Shawn Boburg at al., “Inside the Coronavirus Testing Failure: Alarm and Dismay among the Scientists Who Sought to Help,” Washington Post, April 3, 2020. For an analysis of the CDC’s failures that emphasizes bureaucratic culture rather than the administration’s xenophobia, see Eric Lipton et al., “Built for This, C.D.C. Shows Flaws in Crisis,” New York Times, June 3, 2020, A1. The shortage of working test kits then drove policy decisions about who would have access to tests, which in turn meant that the shape and extent of the epidemic was unknowable until patients started arriving in hospitals. But the US failure to test, trace, and isolate cases was not only a technical failure born of an absence of tests. It was also a failure of the imagination. Countries that instituted successful testing and contact tracing programs were overwhelmingly East Asian countries. That Americans generally compared ourselves to European countries and not to, say, South Korea, signaled how little most Americans could imagine themselves or their governments acting like East Asian democracies.18On this point, see Indi Samarajiva, “In the NYTimes, Only White Leaders Stand Out,” Medium, May 4, 2020. Covid-19 as a problem, and solutions to that problem, were both imagined and presented as intractably foreign.
This racism was pervasive in US society and institutions. As early as February, people who appeared Chinese faced harassment and violence, both in the United States and elsewhere.19I started hearing of racist harassment of students of East Asian nationality or descent as early as February 9, 2020. See also, Sabrina Tavernise and Richard A. Oppel, Jr., “Spit On, Yelled At, Attacked: Chinese-Americans Fear for Safety,” New York Times, March 24, 2020, A1; “Market Harborough Pupils Egged in ‘Coronavirus Attack’,” BBC.com, February 7, 2020; Kyodo News, “Coronavirus Outbreak Stokes Anti-Asian Bigotry Worldwide,” Japan Times, February 18, 2020. Donald Trump and his followers, who spent much of March and April on calling Covid-19 “the Chinese virus” or, even less accurately, “the Chinese flu” or “the Wuhan flu,” abetted this behavior.20See, e.g., Katie Rogers, Lara Jakes, and Ana Sanson, “Trump Calls It the ‘Chinese Virus.’ Critics Say That’s Racist and Provocative,” New York Times, March 19, 2020, A11; “Call It ‘Coronavirus’,” editorial, New York Times, March 24, 2020, A22. For an example of a Republican politician’s continued use of the racist name, see Lindsey Wise, “GOP Rep. Tom Rice Fell Ill From Coronavirus,” Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2020. At a June campaign rally, Trump returned to his racist rhetoric and called Covid-19 “kung flu”; see “Donald Trump Calls Covid-19 ‘kung flu’ at Tulsa Rally,” The Guardian, June 20, 2020. See also Mari Webel, “Calling COVID-19 a ‘Chinese Virus’ is Wrong and Dangerous – The Pandemic is Global,” The Conversation, March 25, 2020. Doing so had an obvious political purpose: it sought to displace blame from Trump’s own failures to those of the Chinese government. In early April, the Trump reelection campaign made this strategy explicit by releasing an advertisement accusing his opponent Joe Biden of being “soft on China,” especially related to coronavirus.21Daniel Dale, Tara Subramaniam, and Holmes Lybrand, “Fact Check: Trump Campaign Hits Biden for Being Soft on China with Deceptive Images and Audio Clips,” CNN, April 13, 2020. In July, Vice President Mike Pence combined Yellow Peril rhetoric with Covid-19, telling Fox News, “If Joe Biden would’ve had his way we literally would’ve had tens of millions of more Chinese coming into our country and spreading the pandemic.”22Pence Interview with Brett Baier, Special Report, Fox News, July 7, 2020. A few days earlier, trade official Peter Navarro made explicit the racist deflection of Trump administration onto China. “It is the Chinese Communist Party that is making us stay locked in our homes and lose our jobs,” he claimed on MSNBC. “They spawned the virus. They hid the virus. They sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals over here to seed and spread the virus before we knew.” See David Badash, “Trump Official Spins Out-of-Control Anti-China Conspiracy Theory,” Alternet, July 3, 2020. Trump’s rhetoric made explicit the structure of his administration’s response.
The Trump administration’s xenophobic response to Covid-19 was not limited to China or people of Asian descent. Trump and his administration have used Covid-19 as an excuse for pursuing their preexisting anti-immigrant agenda.23Katie Rogers, “On Eve of Primary, Trump Weighs In on Democrats (and the Oscars),” New York Times, February 29, 2020, A18. In Texas, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Justice Department worked to speed construction of Trump’s anti-immigrant wall by taking advantage of landowners’ being stuck inside during Covid-19 shutdowns to survey land to be seized.24Zolan Kanno-Youngs, “With Owners Trapped Indoors, U.S. Grabs Land to Build Wall,” New York Times, May 30, 2020, A1. On March 20, the CDC issued an order under the guise of public health authorizing the summary expulsion of any foreign national who arrives at the border without documentation. Crucially, the order included asylum applicants, thus abnegating US obligations under international law to accept those who fear returning to their countries of origin.25→Lucas Guttentag, “Coronavirus Border Expulsions: CDC’s Assault on Asylum Seekers and Unaccompanied Minors,” Just Security, April 13, 2020.
→Joanna Naples-Mitchell, “There is No Public Health Rationale for a Categorical Ban on Asylum Seekers,” Just Security, April 17, 2020.
→Oona Hathaway, “The Trump Administration’s Indefensible Legal Defense of Its Asylum Ban: Taking a Wrecking Ball to International Law,” Just Security, May 15, 2020. Just as the border was a cause for inaction on Covid-19, Covid-19 became a cause for action on the border. The structure of action and inaction was reversed, but the logic was the same: xenophobic racism. The short-lived rule that foreign students would be required to take classes in person highlighted the conjunction: it was simultaneously xenophobic and tried to encourage dangerous, in-person education to deny the continued threat of the pandemic.26Marcia Brown, “Trump’s War on International Students,” American Prospect, July 14, 2020.
To be sure, governments around the world have closed borders, and have closed borders selectively, in response to Covid-19. European countries, despite the Schengen Agreement, reestablished their borders, largely futilely, to prevent the spread of the pandemic.27Steven Erlanger, “Across Europe, Virus Punctures A Cafe Society,” New York Times, March 16, 2020, A1. Japan, meanwhile, permits Japanese citizens to return home, but forbids reentry by foreign residents. That means long-term foreign residents of Japan are either stuck inside Japan regardless of their need to travel or, worse, are stranded outside.28Magdalena Osumi, “Foreign Residents Stranded Abroad by Japan’s Coronavirus Controls,” Japan Times, May 19, 2020. Borders, of course, work both directions, and the closure of borders by other countries puts Americans in an unfamiliar position of exclusion.
Covid-19 and emigration: Exporting disease
The United States, we are told over and over, is a nation of immigrants. At its best, the phrase invokes a tradition of welcome and asylum, a melting pot, a citizenship based on choice, not on blood.29The literature that celebrates the United States as a land of immigrants is vast. See, for example Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1996); David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, revised and updated ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Noah M. J. Pickus, ed., Immigration and Citizenship in the 21st Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). On American citizenship as one of choice not birth, see Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York: Vintage, 2011). At its worst, the immigration narrative ignores—or hides—the Indigenous people who were never immigrants and whom settlers dispossessed and the enslaved Africans brought to the Western Hemisphere in chains. It also forgets the migrants who did not stay: the Italians and Greeks and other “birds of passage” who fly into US history briefly as sojourners but depart it when they return home. Only their cousins who stayed get to be included in the US national narrative.
To imagine the United States as a nation of immigrants also makes us ignore that there are American emigrants. Indeed, it is so difficult to imagine American emigrants that there is a remarkable lack of consensus of even how to count them.30Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels, Migrants or Expatriates?: Americans in Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 27–34; for a table of population estimates see page 33. In 2016, the State Department estimated 9 million American citizens lived abroad.31Helen B. Marrow and Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels, “Modeling American Migration Aspirations: How Capital, Race, and National Identity Shape Americans’ Ideas about Living Abroad,” International Migration Review 54, no. 1 (2020): 84. Using a different methodology, a report in 2018 about overseas voters estimated that 5.5 million Americans lived abroad, about 3 million of whom were adults. According to that report, there were more Americans living in Mexico than in Delaware and more Americans living in Canada than in North Dakota. If Americans abroad were a state, it would be right in the middle by population, between Minnesota and South Carolina.32Fors Marsh Group, “2016 Overseas Citizen Population Analysis Report” (report for the Federal Voting Assistance Program, September 2018). Yet the existence of this US diaspora is mostly ignored.
Covid-19 makes us reckon with the United States not only as an importer of people—that is, a nation of immigrants—but also as an exporter of people. The utter and continued failure of the United States to control its epidemic means that people of any nationality who travel from the United States to other countries are potential vectors—and are seen and treated that way. Obviously not all border-crossers are emigrants, but Covid-19 makes us attend to outgoing border crossings of all sorts, and to note how much even temporary travel is structured by familial connections abroad.33Another group of Americans abroad is soldiers, who are also increasingly the subject of Covid-19 concern. See “Okinawa Demands Answers from US after 61 Marines Contract Coronavirus,” The Guardian, July 12, 2020; “Okinawa Taxi Driver Believed Infected by U.S. Personnel,” Asahi Shimbun, July 16, 2020. On soldiers and their bodies as a key element of the United States in the world, see Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). To take but one example, one study found that 70 percent of Israeli Covid-19 cases came from travelers from the United States.34→Ido Efrati, “Study: Israel Far From COVID-19 Herd Immunity, 70% of Cases Originate in U.S.,” Haaretz, May 18, 2020.
→Marcy Oster, “American Billionaire’s Son Ordered Out of Israel after Violating COVID-19 Restrictions to Meet Girlfriend,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June 15, 2020. The biological and medical facts of viral infection and disease force the recognition of a longstanding social fact: that the flow of migrants is not unidirectional.35On the now global rejection of US citizens for fear of infection, see Indi Samarajiva, “American Passports Are Worthless Now,” Medium, July 9, 2020. On Europe, see Michael Birnbaum and Quentin Ariès, “Europe Prepares to Reopen to Foreign Travelers, but Americans Don’t Even Figure into the Discussion,” Washington Post, June 26, 2020.
One place where that migrant flow is particularly obvious is across the US-Canada border. By one estimate, 826,000 American citizens live in Canada.36Fors Marsh Group, “2016 Overseas Citizen Population Analysis Report,” 10. This is substantially higher that previous estimates; cf. Susanna Groves, “Americans Abroad: US Emigration Policy and Perspectives,” in Diasporas, Development, and Governance, eds. Abel Chikanda, Jonathan Crush, and Margaret Walton-Roberts (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2016), 241; and Klekowski von Koppenfels, Migrants or Expatriates?, 30. A long scholarly tradition celebrates, or at least notes, “the mingling of the Canadian and American peoples” stemming from migration in both directions.37Marcus Lee Hansen and John Bartlet Brebner, The Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940). On cross-border migration, see, among others, Bruno Ramirez, Crossing the 49th Parallel: Migration from Canada to the United States, 1900–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Sarah-Jane Mathieu, North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870–1955 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); John H. Thompson, “American Muckrakers and Western Canadian Reformers,” Journal of Popular Culture 4, no. 4 (Spring 1971): 1060–70; Randy W. Widdis, With Scarcely a Ripple: Anglo-Canadian Migration into the United States and Western Canada, 1880–1920 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1998). The close relationship between the two countries has been particularly remarked at times of crisis. After the Halifax Explosion of 1917, which flattened about a quarter of the city, Massachusetts sent the first relief train from outside the immediate region and continued to aid the city with money and personnel. The existence of a well-endowed Massachusetts-Halifax Relief Committee, along with the familial connections that existed across the border from a few generations of migration, gave explosion survivors and their friends and family the opportunity to build cross-border, transnational political power. People in Massachusetts made demands on Nova Scotian and Canadian elected officials; people in Halifax wrote to the governor of Massachusetts as they would their own official. Disaster created opportunities for experiments in transnationalism from the bottom up.38Remes, “‘Committed as Near Neighbors’.” See also id., Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2016). It is important to note that the ability of people to access this transnational polity was not even, and, for instance, people of African descent could be excluded from it even when they were part of the transnational community. See id., “What We Talk About When We Talk About Africville,” African American Review 51, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 225–226.
What, then, of US-Canada border crossing in the pandemic crisis? The border is closed except for “essential and nondiscretionary” travel, and anyone entering Canada from the United States must agree to quarantine for 14 days. The border closure makes clear how although the Canadian-US relationship is often framed—by politicians and the press—as one that is primarily about trade, that trade is often carried by people. In the second week of May 2020, for instance, the Canadian Border Services Agency reported an 88 percent decrease in land border crossings compared to the previous year, but that meant that more than 127,000 people still crossed the border, the majority of them truckers.39→Catharine Tunney, “Police Report 2,200 Home Quarantine Checks as Trudeau Talks about Stricter Border Measures,” CBC, May 20, 2020.
→Tim O’Shea, “The New State of Our Border: Eerie, Surreal, Ghostly – and Guarded,” Buffalo News, April 14, 2020.
→Rachel Abrams, “Closed Border Cripples Once-Bustling Blaine,” New York Times, July 19, 2020, A5. For those not carrying goods, the border remains closed. Binational families living transnational lives—in one example, a Canadian wife and her American husband who commutes between Windsor and Detroit—are separated indefinitely.40Nicholas Keung, “‘I’d Thought about Swimming Across’: Spouses Split by U.S.-Canada Border Grow Frustrated as Ottawa Mulls Options,” Toronto Star, 29 May 2020. See also Glenda Luymes, “COVID-19: Cross-border Couples Chafe at Border Restrictions,” Vancouver Sun, May 8, 2020. As in Schengen-Area Europe, where people built their lives on the assumption of open borders, Americans and Canadians who relied on easy border crossings found their lives upended when the border closed. Yet among other Canadians, watching the US epidemic with concern, the border closure is very popular.41→Janice Dickson, “Poll Finds 81% of Canadians Say the Canada-U.S. Border Should Remain Closed,” Globe and Mail, July 6, 2020.
→Melanie Woods, “Canadians Say ‘Keep It’ To U.S. Congress Calls For Reopened Border,” HuffPost, July 13, 2020.
→Roxanne Egan-Elliott, “Americans Sailing North to Alaska Causing Waves of Worry around Island,” Victoria Times Colonist, June 14, 2020.
Journalists on both sides of the border have been especially interested in a particular set of migrants: people of various nationalities who cross the border by foot from the United States seeking asylum in Canada. The Safe Third Country Agreement between the United States and Canada creates a loophole to international refugee law and requires that nearly all would-be asylees apply in the country in which they first arrive, which in practice usually means the United States. However, a loophole to the loophole means that asylees who enter Canada irregularly—that is, without inspection at an official border crossing—can seek asylum despite the agreement. Since Trump’s election, about 50,000 people have sought asylum in Canada by crossing irregularly, sparking considerable debate and upset.42→Marcia Brown, “Trump’s Asylum Cruelty on Trial,” American Prospect, January 23, 2020.
→Elise von Scheel, “Special Report: Is The U.S. Safe for Asylum Seekers?” The House, CBC Radio 1, June 1, 2019.
→O’Shei, “The New State of Our Border.” As part of the Covid-19 border closure, Canada announced that these irregular border crossers would be refused and handed over to US authorities.43This official closure was largely a sop to the Conservative opposition, since few would-be refugees were crossing the border anyway. Emma Jacobs, “Canada Closes the Door at Roxham Road Asylum-seeker Crossing,” North Country Public Radio, 26 March 2020; O’Shei, “The New State of Our Border”; Janice Dickson, “Four Asylum Seekers Turned Away at Canada-U.S. Border,” Globe and Mail, April 3, 2020; Adrian Humphreys, “With COVID-19 Clampdown, Number of Asylum Seekers at Canada-U.S. Border Slows to a Trickle,” National Post, April 6, 2020. But Covid-19 changed the discourse on these irregular refugees in the opposite direction, too. Asylum seekers in Canada may work, and many of them moved to Montreal or Toronto and began to make lives there while they awaited their cases’ adjudication. In Montreal, many found homes in the working-class borough of Montreal Nord and worked at nursing homes. During the height of the Covid-19 outbreak in Quebec, Montreal Nord had the highest number of cases. Several asylees working in long-term care facilities died from Covid-19. Their deaths shifted their portrayal from “queue jumpers” or cheaters to “guardian angels” and gave rise to proposals that they be allowed to stay in Canada.44→Verity Stevenson and Benjamin Shingler, “Quebec Relies on Hundreds of Asylum Seekers in Long-term Care Battle against COVID-19,” CBC, May 8, 2020.
→Benjamin Shingler and Verity Stevenson, “COVID-19’s Devastating Toll on Families in Montreal’s Poorest Neighbourhoods,” CBC, May 15, 2020.
→Dan Bilefsky, “Risking Their Lives to Aid Canada, and Hoping That’s Enough to Stay,” New York Times, June 14, 2020, A14.
→Don Macpherson, “Legault’s Response to Migrant ‘Angels’ Is Embarrassing,” op-ed column, Montreal Gazette, May 29, 2020. We can see here how Covid-19 and the discourses surrounding it have altered the politics of US-Canada border crossings, at least for some groups of crossers.
But not all people who leave the United States do so willingly. A major way the United States is exporting Covid-19 is through the forced exportation of people: deportation. The United States deported at least 70 Covid-19–positive people to Guatemala before the beginning of May and an unknown number of Covid-19–positive patients to Haiti.45Monique O. Madan and Jacqueline Charles, “He Says He Has COVID and Has Never Been to Haiti. But ICE Still Wants to Deport Him There,” Miami Herald, May 8, 2020. On Guatemala, see Yael Schacher and Rachel Schmidtke, “Harmful Returns: The Compounded Vulnerabilities of Returned Guatemalans in the Time of Covid-19,” field report, Refugees International, June 2020. Indeed, the true number of people deported who have Covid-19 is unknown, because there has been inadequate testing in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prisons, and ICE appears to have subverted what symptom screening there was.46On Covid outbreaks in ICE prisons, see, e.g., Laura Gómez, “COVID-19 Cases at Eloy Detention Center Surge by 460% since Friday,” AZ Mirror, June 15, 2020. On ICE subverting testing, see “Whistleblowers from Richwood Correctional Center in Louisiana Report Unsafe Practices that Promote the Spread of COVID-19 in ICE Detention,” press release from the Government Accountability Project, July 13, 2020. Popular attention to these deportations may have slowed but did not stop them.47Melissa del Bosque and Isabel Macdonald, “Exporting the Virus: How Trump’s Deportation Flights Are Putting Latin America and the Caribbean at Risk,” Type Investigations, June 26, 2020. But whether or not ICE successfully tests all potential deportees, the controversy highlights three things. First is the way prisons, jails, and other detention facilities like ICE’s private prisons and concentration camps are especially dangerous during a pandemic.48Timothy Williams, Libby Seline, and Rebecca Griesbach, “Infection Rates Escalate in Prisons, and Fear Among Inmates Does, Too,” New York Times, June 17, 2020, A8. Second is to force more consideration of the way deportation—exile, really—projects the United States into the world, distributing US power, culture, and, in this case, US inability to control disease.49See David Brotherton and Luis Barrios, Banished to the Homeland: Dominican Deportees and Their Stories of Exile (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Third, the danger of deporting Covid-19–positive patients to Haiti, which has only 124 intensive care beds and the capacity for 62 ventilated patients, highlights how global health inequalities are linked to global power. Take, for instance, Tuberculosis, an infectious lung disease that kills 4,000 people globally every day despite the existence of a medical cure for about 70 years. Once Tuberculosis was no longer a concern in rich countries, we allowed it to fester in poor countries, where its systematic non- and partial treatment led to the development of drug resistant, multidrug resistant, and extensively drug resistant strains of the bacteria. The loss of antibiotic efficacy thanks to international malign neglect of global health then places even people in rich countries again at risk of the disease. US exportation of Covid-19 is an acute version of a chronic condition.50
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999More Info →
Pandemics, like other disasters, can make visible what has long existed. Covid-19 makes us see the importance of people and bodies who leave the United States, willingly or not. It forces us to see the centrality of border crossing people to the American place in the world. In turn, attention to borders helps us to better analyze the failures of the Trump response to the pandemic. To reckon with the centrality of borders to US politics, society, and culture is to see the United States as a border nation, and to do so helps us understand ourselves better. If the Covid-19 pandemic reveals that the United States as a border nation, it shows us a way forward in our analysis of the United States in the world and indeed of domestic politics.
Banner photo credit: Art L./Flickr
References:
→Sanya Mansoor, “‘A Hotbed for the Virus’: What Travelers Experienced Returning from Europe to Overwhelmed U.S. Airports,” Time, March 15, 2020.
→Matthew T. Maurano et al., “Sequencing Identifies Multiple, Early Introductions of SARS-CoV2 to New York City Region,” medRxiv (preprint, submitted April 2020).
→Joanna Naples-Mitchell, “There is No Public Health Rationale for a Categorical Ban on Asylum Seekers,” Just Security, April 17, 2020.
→Oona Hathaway, “The Trump Administration’s Indefensible Legal Defense of Its Asylum Ban: Taking a Wrecking Ball to International Law,” Just Security, May 15, 2020.
→Marcy Oster, “American Billionaire’s Son Ordered Out of Israel after Violating COVID-19 Restrictions to Meet Girlfriend,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June 15, 2020.
→Tim O’Shea, “The New State of Our Border: Eerie, Surreal, Ghostly – and Guarded,” Buffalo News, April 14, 2020.
→Rachel Abrams, “Closed Border Cripples Once-Bustling Blaine,” New York Times, July 19, 2020, A5.
→Melanie Woods, “Canadians Say ‘Keep It’ To U.S. Congress Calls For Reopened Border,” HuffPost, July 13, 2020.
→Roxanne Egan-Elliott, “Americans Sailing North to Alaska Causing Waves of Worry around Island,” Victoria Times Colonist, June 14, 2020.
→Elise von Scheel, “Special Report: Is The U.S. Safe for Asylum Seekers?” The House, CBC Radio 1, June 1, 2019.
→O’Shei, “The New State of Our Border.”
→Benjamin Shingler and Verity Stevenson, “COVID-19’s Devastating Toll on Families in Montreal’s Poorest Neighbourhoods,” CBC, May 15, 2020.
→Dan Bilefsky, “Risking Their Lives to Aid Canada, and Hoping That’s Enough to Stay,” New York Times, June 14, 2020, A14.
→Don Macpherson, “Legault’s Response to Migrant ‘Angels’ Is Embarrassing,” op-ed column, Montreal Gazette, May 29, 2020.
