This is as essay that I wrote during the pandemic for the edited collection ‘Postcoloniality and Forced Migration‘
Introduction
This chapter explores the intersection of three vectors: (im)mobility, (post)colonial inequality, and disease. For decades, the international community has problematised what has been represented as the excessive and dangerous mobility of people originating in the symbolic geography of what is sometimes termed the ‘Third World’ (which is in this context interchangeable with the Global South) moving to the ‘First World’ (the Global North, or ‘the West’) (see Mayblin and Turner, 2021 for a discussion). This excessive mobility has been widely viewed by politicians, publics, and even academic researchers, as a threat to communities and nation states in the First World. People who are seeking asylum have paid a heavy price; efforts to quarantine them outside of the Global North have intensified with every passing year (Mayblin, 2017). Part of the sense of threat from Third World migrants over at least the past century has been a generalised concern with hygiene, and the bringing of diseases into host countries. This is a theme which reoccurs in research across a range of times and locations (Kraut, 1994).
This chapter seeks to upend such assumptions through discussing the historical and contemporary disease spreading activities of those usually construed as ‘host’ communities. It suggests that it is the excessive mobility of those whose border crossing is rarely problematised or curtailed, often from the First World, that has the potential to be a greater threat to communities, societies and nation states around the world. This is done through focussing on disease, and particularly air borne diseases, and discussing the role of international travel in spreading air borne diseases. The chapter first discusses the question of whose mobility is perceived to be a problem before exploring the emergence of ideas of migrants as disease spreaders. The next section discusses the disease spreading impact of European colonialism from the 15th century onwards in order to establish an inverse analysis of ‘whose mobility is a problem’. The final section explores the implications of the Covid-19 pandemic for migrants immobilised by migration governance regimes in camps and detention centres. Immobilised because of a perception that their mobility was dangerous, they now, ironically, find themselves victims of the consequences of the excessive mobility of their wealthier counterparts. Overall, this chapter situates the Covid-19 pandemic within the context of regimes of mobility and immobility and embeds these in histories of colonialism.
To some extent the argument will entail generalisations across two groups -the mobile and the immobilised. This binary distinction is not intended to encompass all peoples in the world or to identify victims and perpetrators. Rather, the binary is used as an analytical device to highlight tendencies in international migration regimes, and ultimately to argue for more just approaches to border governance. My aim is to highlight some of the ways in which the almost unfettered mobilites of the world’s wealthier inhabitants might in fact be dangerous (rather than benign, if not positive, as it is often portrayed); and to contrast that with the vast and expensive architecture of control erected to prevent or contain Third World mobilities. In recognising these uneven geographies of fear and control we might then argue for more just mobility regimes which overcome the embedded racist logics which currently dominate.
Whose Mobility is a Problem?
Migration and mobility -the permanent or temporary movement of people across sovereign national borders- has been a site of increased scholarly, political and public concern in the First World over the past 70 years. The mobility of some people became a focus of concern in the period following the Second World War because for the first time in living memory increasing numbers of people were seeking to move from former colonies in what became known as the ‘Global South’ to former metropoles or settler colonies in the ‘Global North’. I say ‘move’ because many of these people were not migrating between sovereign states but were exercising their rights to mobility within empires. For example, until 1981 there was no British citizenship which referred only to the Islands of the British Isles, there was only citizenship of the British Empire and Commonwealth (Bhambra 2017). This type of migration -South to North- has been problematised as dangerous, or challenging, in a variety of ways. Mobile subjects, often construed as immigrants, have been subject to racism and general hostility in the street, the workplace, the media, and amongst politicians and policymakers. They have been the subject of concerns around their economic impact, their impact on housing, on schooling, on healthcare and welfare systems; and their ability to ‘cohere’ or ‘integrate’ with communities and societies. Equally, there have been, across different societies and ‘immigrant groups’ repeated concerns around hygiene and diseases which these mobile subjects might bring to their unsuspecting hosts. This is, we might say, a reoccurring trope.
Such concerns have of course been the subject of extensive academic research to test, prove or disprove the veracity of this range of concerns. Whether legitimate or not, politicians and policymakers have also then sought to govern mobile subjects in ways which might control their (imagined or real) impacts on so called ‘host’ societies. Part of this project of governing mobility has been a significant effort at simply preventing people from arriving at all, even when demographic analysis of birth and death rates indicates an urgent need for increasing the size of the working population (Hansen and Jonsson, 2014). A vast architecture of control has thus been put in place in all countries in the First World which seeks to prevent, as far as possible, the entry of people from the Third World (with the exception of the very wealthy). Such efforts are even oriented to forced migrants who should be specially protected from arbitrary barriers to sanctuary under international law (Mayblin, 2017; 2019).
Policies to protect against South-North mobility include walls, fences, strict visa regimes, high visa fees, time restricted visas, salary thresholds for or complete bans on family reunification, carrier sanctions, the proliferation of immigration detention facilities- increasingly offshore; and deportation orders, limitations on economic rights around welfare and work, interception at sea, and advertising campaigns discouraging migration. In the UK even citizens of Global South heritage have themselves subject to deportation in what has come to be known as the ‘Windrush scandal’ (de Noronha, 2020). Mau et. al (2015) have analysed data on visa agreements and found that since 1969 the opportunities for visa free travel have expanded for citizens of OECD countries while they have stagnated or declined for citizens of African countries. In this way, it is relatively easy for someone with a French, British, or Australian passport to travel around the world almost unfettered. Visa fees will be minimal, interrogations in airports rare. Meanwhile, someone with a Libyan or Nigerian passport will be subject to a barrage of checks, costs, barriers and en-route interrogations which make moving across borders slow, difficult, expensive, or impossible. Thus, a vast architecture of control has been erected to prevent South-North mobility, to quarantine Third World citizens outside of the First world (Achiume, 2019). I discuss encampment as a technology for quarantining forced migrants below, but first I will discuss the specific issue of disease as one legitimating factor for the proliferation of such projects of immobilisation.
Migrants as disease spreaders
Within this context of enabling the mobility of some people and disabling the mobility of others, the trope of disease control is a reoccurring one. Alan M. Kraut calls this the ‘double helix of health and fear’ (1994:1). This ‘double helix’ originates in colonial ideas of racial hierarchy in which some bodies (white bodies) are superior to other (brown and black) bodies. As Stuart Hall so eloquently articulated, racism has two registers: biology and culture (Hall 2000). Thus, the cultural extension of ideas of black and brown biologicalinferiority also extended to the sense that people racialised as such inhabit cultures of poor hygiene, ill health and disease proliferation. In part, this was assumed to be associated with their lack of rationality and an intellectual deficiency which prevented proper bodily hygiene and the adoption of modern medical knowledges and techniques. Colonised people, therefore, came to be thought of as diseased as an extension of being mentally irrational and physically weak (Reitmanova et al., 2015). Such ideas do not map neatly on to contemporary ideas of ‘whiteness’ or ethnicity in that groups of people now considered ‘white’ such as Irish nationals, were racialised as inferior in the same way as other groups of colonised and subjugated people into the early 20th century (Ignatiev, 1995). At the same time, scientific racism and social Darwinism also incorporated poor whites into racial schemas connoting physical and intellectual inferiority, which naturally extended to the realms of hygiene and disease (Bonnett, 1998).
It is in colonial ideology that we find the origins of ideas of ‘immigrants’ as bringers of disease. The word immigrants itself is a highly racialised category rarely today associated with those classified as ‘white’, who tend to be represented as ex-pats, emigres, highly skilled migrants, or travellers. ‘Immigrants’, then, becomes a category which semantically crosses over with the symbolic geographies of the colonised and racialised world -postcolonial, developing countries, low income, the Third World, the Global South. Whatever the label, we find in both representations of South-North immigrants as diseased, and colonised subjects as diseased, the colonial time-space imaginary (Reitmanova et al., 2015). That is, the idea that some places in the world (and therefore the people who live there) are ahead in time while others are behind and must catch up (Bhabha, 2005 [1994], Bhambra, 2007). To be ahead means that one has discovered rationality, scientific reason, modern medicine and rigorous hygiene. Places which exist in the past embody a dark age in which hygiene and sanitation are poor and impoverished and irrational people seek superstitious solutions to bodily disease (Ong, 1995; Briggs, 2005). Briggs observes that
individuals deemed to possess modern medical understandings of the body, health, and illness, practice hygiene, and depend on doctors and nurses when they are sick… People who are judged to be incapable of adopting this modern medical relationship to the body, hygiene, illness, and healing—or who refuse to do so—become unsanitary subjects (Briggs, 2005:272)
The ‘Orient’, then, came to be imagined as ‘ravaged by virulent, disgusting diseases’ (Ward, 2002:7). Such people and places live in a state of chaos, and bring dirt, disease, and irrationality into the calm cleanliness of modernity when they arrive in a First World host state (Ong, 1995; Ward, 2002).
We can see, then, a consistent line from colonial ideas of racial threat articulated in terms of disease, and contemporary articulations of the immigrant threat across a range of postcolonial ‘Western’ societies, mainly white settler colonies and former colonial metropoles (Kraut, 1994; Bashford, 1998; Ward, 2002). Kraut (1994:3) observes in the US that the entire group is stigmatized by medicalized nativism, each newcomer being reduced [to the diseased group]… Thus, there is a fear of contamination from the foreign-born’. Contemporary examples are, then, continuous with historical examples from the 19th century or earlier. Kraut (1994) observes that after the 1832 Cholera epidemic in the US, there became a common view that
the Irish were inherently diseased…merely filthy and unmindful of public hygiene, and therefore, were culpable for epidemic diseases. By contrast, Germans, who arrived in large numbers at the same time as the Irish, were either omitted from blame, or praised for their clean homes and orderly life habits (p.4)
He suggests that by 1900 scientific medicine had become ‘a weapon that white Anglo-Saxon Protestant civilization could use to defend itself against the intrusion of those regarded as of inferior breed’ (p.5). In New Zealand Lawrence et. al (2008:733) find that while it was settlers who originally brought Tuberculosis (TB) to the country, by the 21st century it had become popularly labelled a ‘Third-World disease’ and Third World immigrants were thus cast as the major source of TB in the country.
Asylum seekers specifically have been represented as ‘uncontrolled’ immigrants bringing the double threat of disease and crime. Indeed, TB is a common focus for ‘Third World threat’ narratives in a range of countries (Bell, 2006; Reitmanova et al., 2015). It is therefore clear that an association between disease and South-North migration has been a reoccurring trope over several centuries, and that this follows the logics of colonial/modern ideas of racial hierarchy. As with many such examples of prejudice and stereotyping, a large body of academic research has thus followed which problematises these logics. Part of the contribution of this work has been to highlight the fallacies of the assumption that migrants bring diseases to ‘Western’ countries. And yet the trope remains resilient against critique in the popular imagination and is one of a range of justifications for controlling South-North mobilities (another key one being economic threat).
Colonialism, Mobility, Disease, Genocide
As noted above, while there is a plethora of literature which challenges the disease spreading potential of racialised migrants, there is a much smaller literature on the dangerous disease spreading mobilities of First World actors in the contemporary period. There is, however, a well established literature, particularly in the discipline of history, which describes the impact of European colonial exploration and conquest on indigenous societies from the 15th century onwards. With first contact, colonial explorers and settlers alike brought new diseases to which existing communities had no pre-existing immunity. There are many reports of whole populations being wiped out within very short spaces of time. For example, Columbus found a densely populated Hispaniola (the Caribbean island divided in the present day between Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in 1492 but within half a century ‘the paradise Columbus described upon returning to Europe from the first voyage was transformed into a graveyard for most Caribbean natives’. Virtually none of the indigenous population, the Tainto, remained. This was a result of a variety of factors, including the use of violence by colonisers, but disease played its part. The first major smallpox outbreak was recorded in 1518 and killed a large proportion of what remained of the population according to Cook (1993). While colonial mobilities and migrations were explicitly violent, then, and sought to subjugate, control, enslave, and at times kill local populations, disease also presented an invisible unintended threat to them.
It is unlikely that TB existed in New Zealand before the arrival of Europeans in the 19th century, but it was described as endemic within both European settler and (by then depleted) Maori populations by the second half of the 19th century (Lawrence et al., 2008). Many settlers suffering from TB had come from Britain to the colony specifically in the hope that the milder climate might cure them, but instead they merely spread it in new territories (Bryder, 1996). The Aboriginal population of what is now Australia also declined drastically after the arrival of the British. Death occurred in all areas soon after contact with Europeans for a number of reasons but was primarily disease related (Moses, 2007). Typically, the decline of North American Indian populations by contact, direct or indirect, with Europeans included exposure to smallpox, measles, the bubonic plague, cholera, typhoid, pleurisy, scarlet fever, diphtheria, mumps, whooping cough, colds, gonorrhoea, chancroid, pneumonia, typhus and syphilis, according to Stiffarm and Lane jr. (1992). This killing (whether it constitutes ‘genocide’ or not is a matter of ongoing debate) through disease was not always intentional, though there is evidence that disease spreading was used as a form of early biological warfare (Mann, 2009). It also pre-empted later purposeful massacres as colonialism took hold. With or without intent, diseases were very effective at decreasing native populations, which was central to settler colonialism (Byrd, 2011).
Thus, while violence was central to colonisation, many more indigenous people died from disease, malnutrition and starvation. Ostler (2015:24) argues that in the case of the Caribbean only a small percentage of the indigenous population died from so called ‘virgin soil’ epidemics, where diseases are spread at the moment of initial contact. In fact, disease became the largest killer later on, flourishing under conditions the Spanish created as they colonized the islands.’ Military strategies of destroying the indigenous agricultural base across the Americas ‘served to impose starvation conditions upon entire peoples, dramatically lowering their resistance to disease and increasing their susceptibility to epidemics’ (Stiffarm and Lane Jr, 1992:33). Forced relocation or concentration of peoples also had an impact on susceptibility to disease.
The intersection of disease and violence is a common thread through research on colonialism and has been associated with the dramatic decline in indigenous populations around the world from the fifteenth century onwards. This is not simply about ‘first contact’ and exposure to new diseases, it is also about a wide range of colonial economic, social and political practices which Europeans introduced, as noted above. Colonists forged new ‘epidemiological links’, ‘either by relaying diseases (like smallpox and measles) long present in Europe or by establishing ties between parts of the world that had previously had few (if any) such connections with each other’ (Arnold, 1988:5). At the same time, ‘European trade and transportation helped the spread of disease vectors, the mosquitoes, fleas and lice by which epidemics were communicated’ (ibid). Some diseases required more long-term intimate contact in order to reach epidemic levels. Syphilis, for example (which was known in India in the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries as ‘the European disease’) was communicated via sexual contact with Europeans (Arnold, 1988).
We might imagine that movement around the globe in the contemporary moment is completely different to that in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. While of course travel is much faster and is accessible to a much broader range of the population today thanks to the advent of international air travel, some aspects are remarkably similar. Diseases continue to be silent travellers brought on human bodies from one part of the world to another, and some human bodies are infinitely more internationally mobile than other bodies. In fact, those who are the most internationally mobile today are still those coming from the former metropoles of colonising empires (see below). In the next section I jump forward to the contemporary period, and highlight the commonalities between these colonial histories and the management of mobilities in the Covid-19 pandemic.
Mobility, Immobility, and Covid-19
Like other epidemics, Covid-19 spread along circuits of mobility. And since wealthier citizens of the world are more mobile than others, it has been those with relative privilege that took the virus to every populous continent in the world. Having jumped from animal to human in a wet market in the city of Wuhan in China, the Covid-19 virus first left China with an infected Chinese tourist who was visiting Thailand in January. The virus was first officially identified by the World Health Organisation on the 16th January. Within four months there were over 1.3m confirmed cases, and over 75,000 deaths worldwide. Research to date finds a common thread among those who bring the virus to new countries or create new externally precipitated outbreaks: they are people with the privileges of international mobility. They are international students, tourists, business travellers, and aid workers. It should not be a surprise, then, that Europe and North America had outbreaks before South America, and that Africa’s outbreaks came later. In researching for this chapter I have not found a single report of an irregular migrant being the source of an outbreak.
Global dissemination of Covid-19, according to Frutos et al., writing in Frontiers in Medicine, (2020:2)occurred ‘due to intensive international mobility and global international trade’. Oztig and Askin (2020) found that countries which have a higher number of airports are associated with higher number of Covid-19 cases, and those with more internationally mobile populations also had more Covid-19 cases. They explain that the scale of the movement of people today is unprecedented, making the spread of diseases globally much faster than previously. Back in 2006 Tatem and colleagues observed that ‘Air, sea and land transport networks continue to expand in reach, speed of travel and volume of passengers and goods carried. Pathogens and their vectors can now move further, faster and in greater numbers than ever before’ (Tatem et. al, 2006:293). Their warning was that this increased global mobility and interconnection was going to increase the risk of large scale outbreaks such as Covid-19.
What such contemporary studies miss are two key historical and sociological facts. First, that while the speed of epidemic spread has increased, sea and land transport in support of colonialism as well as war and trade have very long histories, as outlined earlier in this chapter. And second, that we must not allow the idea of ‘globalised’ mobility flows to blind us to the fact that the mobility of some groups of people globally, not just for migration, but frequent and repeated mobilities around the globe for tourism and business, is far in excess of the mobility of others (Mau et al., 2015). There were some restrictions on international travel through the pandemic which amounted to inconveniences for highly mobile people with passports that allow almost unrestricted international travel, such as an obligation to quarantine upon return from holidays. But for refugees, already wrapped up in a web of immobilisation, it is their very immobility that has exposed them to the virus. I will explain what I mean by this with reference to refugee camps as a specific technology of immobilisation.
As part of efforts to regionally quarantine refugees in the Third World, First World states support and fund the UNHCR and host state governments to set up large, often semi-permanent, camps for refugees in locations either on the edge of the First World (e.g. Greek islands) or in the Third World (e.g. Jordan, Kenya). These camps aim to contain, control, and segregate refugees from host communities, and are characterised by contradictory imperatives: care/control, compassion/repression (McConnachie, 2016). Encampment is in part rooted in concern about the impact of refugees on those states that might host them, including the diseases that they may bring, and in a hierarchy of humanity consonant with colonial logics. But it is refugees whose health is damaged by such measures.
Kluge et. al (2020:1238) note that camps ‘provide inadequate and overcrowded living arrangements that present a severe health risk to inhabitants and host populations’. They further note the ‘absence of basic amenities, such as clean running water and soap, insufficient medical personnel, and poor access to adequate health information are major problems in these settings’ (ibid). This is true also for the squalid camps set up on the edges of Europe to contain and segregate refugees. For example, Moria camp on the Greek island of Lesbos was Europe’s largest refugee camp before it burned down in July 2020. Twenty thousand refugees were living long term in a camp designed for the temporary accommodation of three thousand and there was an ‘absence of basic amenities, poor sanitary conditions and insufficient medical personnel, equipment and pharmaceuticals’ (Vonen et. al, 2020). Recent evidence suggests that children’s health is worsening over time in Greek camps, though that is also the case for refugee children in other settings (Vonen et. al, 2020; De Montgomery et. al, 2019).
Poor hygiene in refugee camps and a lack of medication to manage chronic diseases are ‘important factors that increase the risk (and spread) of infectious disease outbreaks and emergency cases among refugees (Vonen et al., 2020:np). In the Covid-19 context, then, ‘social distancing, hand hygiene and self-isolation, will be almost impossible to implement in any refugee camp’ (ibid). There is little data on Covid-19 infection rates in refugee camps in general at the time of writing but Kamal et. al (2020) and Lopez Pena et. al (2020) have undertaken detailed analysis of the Cox’s Bazaar camp which accommodates Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Both were pessimistic about a Covid-19 outbreak in the camp owing to overcrowding, lack of testing, lack of public health trained staff, poor access to sanitation, widespread misinformation about how the disease is spread, and low literacy levels amongst camp inhabitants who speak a range of different languages. Poor control of previous disease outbreaks had not led to improvements (Kamal, Huda et al. 2020). Lopez-Pena (2020) found in a phone‐based survey of 909 households that 24∙6% of camp residents compared to 13∙4% of those in host communities reported at least one common symptom of Covid‐19, and that camp residents were more likely to attend religious or social gatherings, being unaware that this increased the likelihood of contracting the disease. Kamal et. al (2020) found that the Covid-19 death rate was higher among the Rohingya refugees (8.04%) compared to the host community (1.66%). In part this was because there was only one testing centre in the camp for a population of one million, only one institutional quarantine centre, no Intensive Care Unit (ICU) or ventilator capacity in the camp, and no transportation to ICUs outside of the camp, which are only for host state communities (Kamal et al., 2020).
A WHO report on the European region in 2018 explained that the evidence shows that there ‘is a very low risk of transmitting communicable diseases from the refugee and migrant population to the host population’ (WHO, 2018). Prevalence of longstanding diseases such as TB is present in refugee communities at around the same rate as prevalence amongst host societies. The same is true for HIV and in fact ‘a significant proportion of those refugees and migrants who are HIV positive acquire infection after they have arrived in the [European] Region, and they are more likely to be diagnosed later in their HIV infections’ (ibid). They explain that health systems in European host states are ‘well equipped and experienced in diagnosing and managing common infectious diseases’ and that the arrival of refugees and migrants does ‘not pose additional health security threats to host communities’ (ibid:80). Yet because of the hostile environments in which refugees in Europe often find themselves, refugees who are not encamped nevertheless ‘typically face administrative, financial, legal, and language barriers to access the [host state] health system’ (Kluge et. al, 2020: np), even where the healthcare system is ‘well equipped’ to support the population in general. This is sometimes referred to as the ‘healthy immigrant effect’, whereby migrants tend to be healthier than the general population upon arrival but in worse health than the general population a few years post arrival, owing to socio-economic disadvantage (Kennedy et al., 2015). The evidence suggests, then, that rather than refugees posing a health threat to host communities which must be addressed with stricter border controls, it is anti-asylum border controls which threaten the health of refugees -before and in the context of Covid-19.
It should not surprise us then that Covid-19 has led to more restrictions on the rights of refugees to seek asylum and that this has been introduced under the guise of protecting host communities. This is aptly theorised in relation to Achille Mbembe’s (2003) work on necropolitical abandonment -letting surplus populations die through inaction. During the pandemic Sabi Ardalan (2020) suggested in a blog for the University of New South Wales’ Kaldor Centre on the impact of Covid-19 on refugees and migrants globally, that border closures implemented in response to Covid-19 have ‘effectively suspended the right of people to seek asylum in many countries around the world’. The pandemic and the associated risks ‘allegedly posed by the arrival of foreigners may provide the perfect alibi for governments and politicians determined to close their borders and exclude or expel refugees’, argued Crisp (2020:np). Border closures have involved people seeking asylum being turned back at sea and on land, even when this will leave them trapped in conflict zones or dangerous transit countries.
In the Aegean Sea, Greece used a tactic of rescuing drowning migrants and then forcing them into life rafts which are left to drift into Turkish waters (Keady-Tabbal 2020). Malta refused entry to people seeking asylum rescued on private vessels (Ardalan 2020), and thousands of Rohingya refugees were left stranded and starving in Bay of Bengal because, according to the UN, of Covid-19 fears (United Nations, 2020). Meanwhile, the United States (U.S.) introduced summary deportations of people within 2 hours of entry, denying the right to claim asylum, justified on the basis of public health (Department of Health and Human Services, 2020). This was part of a concerted effort by president Trump to ‘establish the disease as foreign to the U.S. national body, locating it in Other geographies and bodies’, using ‘racialized labels emphasizing the virus as foreign or exogenous’, for example referring to Covid-19 as the Chinese virus and the kung flu(Gross-Wyrtzen, 2020:3).
At the start of the pandemic, search and rescue operations in the central Mediterranean led to the immediate quarantine of migrants in reception centres in spite of the fact that at that time there was not a single confirmed case of Covid-19 on the continent of Africa. Indeed, many refugees and migrants arriving in Europe at this time were ‘travelling from countries not yet substantially affected by Covid-19 and entering countries with increasing numbers of Covid-19 cases’, leading Kluge et al (2020:np) to conclude that ‘this vulnerable population has a low risk of transmitting communicable diseases to host populations in general’. On the contrary, ‘refugees and migrants are potentially at increased risk of contracting diseases, including Covid-19, because they typically live in overcrowded conditions without access to basic sanitation’. Once national lockdowns were introduced in Europe, rescues were then suspended, apparently because of logistical difficulties created by Covid-19 (Kluge et al, 2020: np). This will certainly have led to loss of life in the Mediterranean sea; weeks-long disembarkation refusals have led to at least 6 suicide attempts on one humanitarian vessel alone (Gross-Wyrtzen, 2020). In summary then, Covid-19 has posed life threatening risks to refugees as a direct consequence of efforts to exclude them from First World territories at the same time as being disproportionately transmitted internationally by the worlds most privileged people.
Conclusion
This chapter has explored the intersection of three vectors: (im)mobility, (post)colonial inequality, and disease. It has described the emergence of an international regime of immobilisation over recent decades which has in part drawn on longstanding ideas of Third World migrants as disease spreading threats. This regime of immobilisation has placed refugees at significantly increased risk before and during the Covid-19 pandemic in spite of the sense of threat commonly being located in the Third World immigrant body. These ideas of disease bearing threat have their origins in colonial (racial) ideas of biological and cultural inferiority. And yet, as the chapter has shown, history tells us that it is colonialism and the mobilities caused by it, as well as the excessive mobilities of colonisers, which have long presented a threat to communities and nations from air borne disease.
In building this argument, I hope to have shown how uneven geographies of disease related to fear and control are both misplaced and actively endanger refugee and irregular migrants who find themselves entangled in regimes of immobilisation. Drawing on this, we might then argue for more just mobility regimes which overcome the embedded racist logics which currently dominate. Indeed, through equalising rights of mobility we might not only decrease the risks to all humans from air borne disease, and protect the world’s most vulnerable and in need from the consequences of excessive privileged mobility. Relentless and proliferating circular mobilities -tourism, business trips, backpacking and so forth, might then give way to safe and legal one way mobilities for those in actual need of sanctuary and protection. Colonial histories, then, give us the tools to not only correct misplaced anxieties, but also to imagine more just regimes of mobility and immobility moving forward.
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Dr. Lucy Mayblin 
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