As the WHO tracks the status of the novel coronavirus, upgrading it from an outbreak to a pandemic, a second scourge has followed in its path: a virulent racism that scapegoats refugees, asylum seekers and foreigners more generally as the cause of the outbreak.
This is not only false and cruel, but also dangerous. Politicizing the crisis and stigmatizing whole populations risks turning fiction into fact by stoking fear and driving the disease underground, making it more difficult to manage. Have we forgotten the central lesson of the HIV/AIDS pandemic?
Italy’s populist leader Matteo Salvini was among the first to target migrants in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic — and, as usual, without any evidence. Salvini called on Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte to resign after the government allowed a boat with 276 Africans rescued at sea to dock in Sicily. Arguing for “armor-plated” borders, he said that Conte had failed to “defend Italy and Italians.”
Asylum seekers had nothing to do with the spread of the virus in Italy. In fact, an Italian visiting Algiers is believed to have been responsible for one of the first two African cases of COVID-19.
Unfortunately, Salvini is not alone. Nationalist leaders across Europe are using the crisis to close borders and even to call for an end to the EU’s Schengen Area of border-free travel.
This reactionary chorus includes National Rally president Marine Le Pen in France, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and leaders of far-right parties in Germany, Spain, Switzerland and Austria. US President Donald Trump’s administration has stopped flights from Europe in a bid to control the spread of the coronavirus, and said that it is “very strongly considering” closing the country’s southern border.
Even more cynically, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan opened his country’s borders and bused more than 10,000 Syrian refugees to the frontiers of Greece and Bulgaria. Erdogan aims to use the specter of a rerun of the 2015 refugee crisis — amplified by the COVID-19 threat — to wrest concessions from the EU.
The conservative Greek government responded by closing the country’s borders, suspending asylum processing and summarily deporting arriving asylum seekers. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis invoked an EU directive allowing member states to elevate border security if public health is at risk.
“We will do whatever it takes to prevent the appearance of the virus — particularly there [the Greek islands],” Mitsotakis said.
Hungary also has blocked access to asylum. Predictably, the EU — which has failed either to craft an effective asylum policy of its own or to provide adequate support to frontline countries such as Turkey — faces another political crisis.
However, the real Achilles’ heel in Greece, as in other countries hosting refugees, is the abysmal conditions in which asylum seekers are forced to live. More than 40,000 migrants languish in Greek island camps that are designed to house a small fraction of that number. The camps lack the most basic healthcare and sanitation, with one toilet for hundreds of people in some locations.
These conditions exist five years after the Mediterranean refugee crisis and in an EU member state. Conditions on the other side of the Mediterranean — in Libya and Lebanon — are even worse.
The crisis could become much worse. The coronavirus is spreading rapidly in Iran, which hosts 1 million Afghan refugees. The country’s health system is considered to be one of the best in the Middle East and yet it is struggling to cope.
In Lebanon, public health is weak and refugees face rampant discrimination. Iraq, Syria and Yemen have fragmented, underfunded healthcare systems that have been crippled by war. Millions of Syrians are on the move again as a result of the horrific Russian aerial bombing of Idlib, fueling even more pressure on Turkey’s borders.
It is these populations — weakened by the effects of conflict, and forced to flee and endure desperate conditions in the process — that have the most to fear and lose from COVID-19.
The singling out of border-crossing migrants is morphing into broader attacks on diversity. In many countries, people of Asian descent are reporting racist attacks, saying that they feel fearful living and working in the communities they used to think of as home.
“The government is helping the spread of the virus,” a headline in the right-wing Italian daily Libero read. “For Conte and his scientists, racism is the disease, not coronavirus.”
Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson said that liberals would “let you die before they admitted that diversity is not our strength.”
Under international law, governments addressing public health threats can adopt only measures that are supported by science, proportionate to the risks involved and anchored in human rights, including the right to seek asylum and the prohibition of discrimination.
Responses that stigmatize whole populations and disproportionately affect the most vulnerable are not only wrong, but would also fail to control the spread of the coronavirus.
Faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, the international community should ensure that places with large refugee and migrant populations have the necessary resources to serve all of their residents. All healthcare facilities should be free of immigration enforcement and COVID-19 responses should not trigger any immigration enforcement.
Refugees and forced migrants were not the source of COVID-19’s spread. Blaming these vulnerable groups damns them twice — and exposes everyone to even greater risks. The history of epidemics shows that how we treat our most vulnerable populations determines the fate of us all.
Gregory Maniatis is director of the Open Society Foundations’ International Migration Initiative. Monette Zard is director of the Forced Migration and Health Program at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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