Opportunistic oppression: U.S. migration restrictions and public health policy during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world in Spring 2020, the Trump administration invoked war against the coronavirus to severely restrict admission of migrants and asylum seekers into the United States. At the same time, it declined to enact national measures to control viral community spread and sharply criticised public health policies. We analyse this notable inconsistency as a case of opportunistic oppression whereby policymakers take advantage of a crisis to pursue pre-existing, and often unrelated, policy preferences. We identify how the securitisation of health and the crisis-enabled politics of enmity allowed the Trump administration to cynically erode migrant human rights protections while simultaneously failing to contain the pandemic. Opportunistic oppression represents an attractive strategy for states facing real and imagined emergencies to pursue political agendas that are not necessarily part of a coherent and effective response to the crisis at hand.

Rights

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2022.2044314

Repository URI

https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/d454e74f-0984-45f4-81c3-c72a295d47f1