Europe’s unsafe environment: migrant confinement under Covid-19

In this article, we examine border closures and forms of migrant confinement in the EUropean context that have been carried out in the name of safety and protection – of both citizens and migrant travellers – from the Covid-19 virus.Footnote1 While, at the outbreak of the pandemic, cosmopolitan travellers and international tourists were asked by ‘their’ national governments to return home, those already displaced and precariously on the move were meant to be kept ‘elsewhere’ and prevented from crossing borders for their own sake. The rationale of EUropean authorities that the well-being of migrants could not be protected given the lack of resources and overwhelmed health systems, indicate, we argue in this essay, a shift from a EUropean policy of hostile environment that has predominated over the past five years since 2015’s ‘migration crisis’ towards a paradigm of an unsafe and risky environment where the Covid-19 conditions justify, in the name of protection and safety, migrant deterrence and confinement practices.