Failing to Protect Bare Life During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Forced Migrants as Carriers of the Virus

This study compares the restriction of mobility of forced migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic between March 2020 and December 2021 in the United States and Ecuador. Based on the critical discourse analysis of anti-migrant rhetoric in press articles, migrant stories in the press, reports, and border control practices, I examine the Ecuadorian government’s response to the migration flow of Venezuelans and the United States’ enforcement practices against Central American asylum seekers. By exploring Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life, I argue that this failure to protect forced migrant’s rights is due to the United States’ and Ecuador’s representations of forced migrants as bare life and carriers of the virus, justifying xenophobia and resistance to humanitarian international law. By drawing on a feminist intersectional approach, I add to recent research on the securitization of forced migration and challenge the race/ethnicity, immigration status, class, and nationality-based discrimination of the measures undertaken during the pandemic. I illustrate how the treatment of forced migrants as bare life was aggravated by their intersectional inequalities. I conclude by providing recommendations that could be considered by the U.S. and Ecuadorian governments to protect the right to freedom of mobility.