Abstract
While global travel largely stopped and borders closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, states continued to deport individuals who had been sentenced for committing criminal offences. In Australia and New Zealand, questions over whether and how deportation of migrants during a global pandemic should occur were raised: weighing up arguments of legality, public health, and security. This left many migrants uncertain, isolated in immigration detention waiting for an unknown departure date. The decision was made to continue the deportation process for many, and in some cases breaches of public health restrictions were the basis for deportation. Once deported, mandatory quarantine on arrival under COVID-19 restrictions highlights and exacerbates the challenges that returning offenders normally face. These include extended detention periods; surveillance through detention and monitoring; and securitised discourse by the media and public creating ongoing stigma. This snapshot enables us to understand how states prioritised the removal of ‘the crimmigrant other’, a securitised threat, while facing the material threat of COVID-19.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic closed borders and created unprecedented restrictions on international travel to mitigate a materialised global public health threat
When two ‘threats’ are faced simultaneously by states—both the material health threat and the constructed threat of criminal non-citizens—how do states act? Which ‘threat’ becomes prioritised? In this article, I argue that when states have continued to deport ‘the crimmigrant other’ in the face of a material threat that has affected the world to the extent that COVID-19 has, the securitisation of migration and deportation has clearly been weighted more heavily within a national security risk assessment and taken priority
I consider the ‘crimmigrant other’ as a securitised threat to the state balanced against the material public health threat, and argue that Australia and New Zealand have prioritised the deportation of convicted non-citizens in the face of the very real harm caused by the COVID-19 pandemic
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic closed borders and created unprecedented restrictions on international travel to mitigate a materialised global public health threat. This is supported by government documentation (reports, briefing papers, diplomatic cables, and official statistics) detailing New Zealand’s own deportations in the period between March 2020 and March 2021, sourced under the Official Information Act 1982 process Through this analysis, I consider the ‘crimmigrant other’ as a securitised threat to the state balanced against the material public health threat, and argue that Australia and New Zealand have prioritised the deportation of convicted non-citizens in the face of the very real harm caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Weber and Pickering (2013) use the terminology ‘exporting risk’ through return: by returning non-citizens and using political rhetoric against them, the state is portraying the reduction of risk or ‘threat’ to society from those who are different and could have a negative societal impact through crime It is this constructed ‘threat’ of criminal non-citizens and the action of deportation to remove such a threat that I argue is being prioritised over the material threat of COVID-19. The ‘crimmigrant other’ is deemed a higher perceived threat than the material threat of a global pandemic, at the expense of migrants’ welfare and the potential health risk of detaining people in close proximity and moving people at a time when borders are otherwise closed
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