The Dilemma of Undocumented Migrants’ Visibility to COVID-19 Counting

On March 13, 2020, after announcing that Europe had become the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, World Health Organization’s Executive Director Dr. Michael Ryan made a plea to assist invisible populations. “We cannot forget migrants, we cannot forget undocumented workers, we cannot forget prisoners,” he argued. In just a few days, civil societies around the world discovered that invisibility is indeed a recurrent companion to the virus. COVID-19 is exceptionally hard to contain due to its asymptomatic contagion and long incubation period. It has also been hard to classify as a cause of death, complicating the efforts to trace it and count its victims. Despite narratives about its alleged democratic character, the virus seems to decimate weak, invisible populations the hardest. The elderly confined to care homes have been decimated across Europe, and largely uncounted. From China to Pennsylvania, the toll of people passing away in the solitude of their homes or shelters does not appear in official statistics. Undocumented migrants are also dying from the virus because they are too afraid to seek help, so their numbers are typically not reflected in official statistics. If today “being counted” is even more so a condition of existence and care, Western countries are failing to account for the health conditions of these invisible populations. In the days of COVID-19, what these dramatic missing numbers make apparent is that invisibility may mean death.