The COVID-19 blame game threatens us all

As COVID-19 coronavirus infections reach pandemic levels, a second scourge has followed in their wake: A virulent racism that scapegoats refugees, asylum-seekers and foreigners in general as the cause of the outbreak.

This is not only false and cruel but also dangerous. Politicizing the crisis and stigmatizing entire populations risks turning fiction into fact by stoking fear and driving the disease underground, making it more difficult to manage. Have we forgotten the central lesson of the HIV/AIDS pandemic?

Italian far-right leader Matteo Salvini was among the first to target migrants in connection with the outbreak — as usual, without any evidence to back up his claims. He called on Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte to resign after the government allowed a boat carrying 276 Africans, who had been rescued at sea, to dock in Sicily. Arguing for “armor-plated” borders, Salvini said Conte had failed to “defend Italy and Italians.”

Asylum-seekers had nothing to do with the spread of the virus in Italy. In fact, an Italian visiting Algiers is believed to be responsible for one of the first two African cases of COVID-19.

Unfortunately, Salvini is not alone. Nationalist leaders across Europe are using the crisis as an excuse to close borders, and even to call for the abolition of the EU’s Schengen Area, its border-free travel zone. This reactionary chorus includes Marine Le Pen in France, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the leaders of far-right parties in Germany, Spain, Switzerland and Austria.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently opened his country’s borders and transported more than 10,000 Syrian refugees to the frontiers of Greece and Bulgaria. His aim is to use the threat of a repeat of the 2015 refugee crisis — exacerbated by the COVID-19 health risks — to extract concessions from the EU.

The conservative Greek government responded by closing the country’s borders, suspending the processing of asylum requests and summarily deporting any refugees who arrive. To do so, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis invoked an EU directive that allows member states to heighten border security if public health is at risk. “We will do whatever it takes to prevent the appearance of the virus — particularly (in the Greek islands),” he said. Hungary also has blocked refugees in recent days.

Predictably, the EU — which has failed to craft an effective refugee policy of its own or to provide adequate support to countries in the front line of the crisis, such as Turkey — now faces another political crisis.

The history of epidemics shows that how we treat our most vulnerable populations determines the fate of us all.

Maniatis A. Gregory and Monette Zard

But the real Achilles heel in Greece, as in other countries hosting refugees, is the abysmal conditions in which the migrants are forced to live. More than 40,000 of them languish on Greek islands in camps designed to house a fraction of that number. They lack the most basic health care and sanitation facilities, with hundreds of people sharing a single toilet in some places.

These conditions persist in an EU member state, five years after the Mediterranean refugee crisis began. Conditions on the other side of the Mediterranean — in Libya and Lebanon — are even more dire.

Moreover, the crisis could become much worse. The coronavirus is spreading fast in Iran, which hosts a million Afghan refugees.

In Lebanon, by contrast, public-health provision is weak and refugees face rampant discrimination. Iraq, Syria and Yemen have fragmented, underfunded health-care systems that have been crippled by war. And millions of Syrians are on the move again as a result of the horrific Russian aerial bombing of Idlib, creating even more pressure along Turkey’s borders.

It is these populations, already weakened by the effects of prolonged conflict, and now forced to flee and endure desperate conditions in the process, that have the most to fear and lose from the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the targeting of border-crossing migrants is morphing into broader attacks on diversity. In many countries, people of Asian descent report racist attacks and say they feel fearful living and working in communities they used to think of as home.

“The government is helping the spread of the virus,” a recent headline in the right-wing Italian daily Libero claimed. “For Conte and his scientists, racism is the disease, not coronavirus.”

In the US, Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson claimed that liberals would “let you die before they admitted that diversity is not our strength.”

Under international law, governments, while addressing public health threats, must adopt only measures that are supported by science, proportionate to the risks involved, and anchored in human rights, including the right to seek asylum and the prohibition of discrimination. Responses that stigmatize entire populations and disproportionately affect the most vulnerable are not only wrong, they also will fail to control the spread of disease.

Faced with an escalating COVID-19 crisis, the international community must ensure that cities and states with large refugee and migrant populations have the necessary resources to serve all their residents. All health-care facilities should be free of immigration enforcement, and responses to the outbreak should not trigger immigration enforcement.

Refugees and forced migrants are not the source of the virus, nor are they responsible for it spreading. Blaming these most vulnerable groups damns them twice and exposes everyone to even greater risks.

The history of epidemics shows that how we treat our most vulnerable populations determines the fate of us all.

• Gregory A. Maniatis is director of the International Migration Initiative at the Open Society Foundations.
• Monette Zard is director of the Forced Migration and Health Program at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
• Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2020.