COVID-19 and migration: we need a firewall

Rather obviously COVID-19 is a global public health emergency. Tackling it, particularly in the absence of a vaccine, means blocking and shortening the chains of contagion through personal hygiene and social distancing, identifying people who are infected, treating those who need treatment, enabling the isolation of the infected for as long as they can transmit. & cetera. And the issue is not just about the risk to each of us, but also about the risk we bring to others. So the fact that the fit and young may escape with minor discomfort shouldn’t lead them to exempt themselves from necessary measures, because the chain that leads from them can be a death sentence for a vulnerable or elderly person.

All of which brings me to immigration and, specifically, to immigrant populations. In recent years governments with good public health systems have moved to restrict access to citizens and legal permanent residents. In the UK, one of the features of the “hostile environment” that has led to the Windrush scandal was the denial of medical care to people who couldn’t prove their entitlement. Others have been hit with enormous medical bills because of their nationality and perceived immigration status. But now, obviously, we can’t have a situation where people are deterred from seeking help because they fear being hit with a huge payment.

Nor, in any country, can we have it that people stay in the shadows because they fear that if they come to the attention of medical and other public health authorities, their precarious immigration status will be disclosed and they will be detained and deported. In other words, to fight COVID-19 we need to put in place the “firewall” between the provision of essential public services and immigration enforcement that Joseph Carens argued for in his book *The Ethics of Immigration*. Medics and other public authorities have to be barred from disclosing the immigration status of those they are dealing with in the context of COVID-19 to the immigration enforcment agencies. Otherwise, people will stay hidden, sick, unjustly denied help themselves and blamelessly placing others at risk.

The other relevant group whom states should be reaching out to protect are refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants who those states have coralled in camps and “reception centres” in various places around the world, including the Greek islands but also the archipelago of places where Australia warehouses its unwanted. You can’t effectively protect people from those chains of contagion if you have jammed them together in close proximity in an overcrowded space. Nor can you ensure that they have access to adequate treatment if there are only a few volunteer doctors available for a large population. Naturally, the same goes for those populations stuck beyond the borders of wealthy states in places like Libya or Mexico by their exclusionary policies.

The discourse of populist politicians like Trump, Orban and Salvini is going to be to use COVID-19 to advance their nationalist and anti-immigrant agenda. Journalists urgently need to be asking them, and other politicians, what they are doing to stop that very agenda from having consequences that shame and endanger us all.