Viral bodies: racialised and gendered logics in the securitisation of migration during COVID-19 in Italy

ABSTRACT

Since the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, migrants’ mobility has been increasingly securitised as governments have been adopting extraordinary measures to close both external and internal borders. Similarly, the presence of migrants within countries has often been met with lower levels of acceptance, leading to the implementation of discriminatory and xenophobic measures. Although debates on the securitisation of migration are well established in the literature, this article demonstrates how the securitisation of migration during the COVID-19 pandemic has relied on gendered and racialised notions deeply entrenched in the legacy of colonial modernity. Examining newspaper articles and declarations by Italian prominent politicians, this contribution shows how this process has happened through 4 main discursive frames imbued with racial and gendered assumptions: 1) the virus as a foreign threat; 2) migrants as diseased bodies; 3) migrants as a burden; 4) migrants as racialised hypermasculine bodies.

KEYWORDS:

• Securitisation
• racism
• gender
• migration
• Covid-19 pandemic

Introduction

At the beginning of 2020 an airborne disease later identified as COVID-19 started to spread around the globe. Realising the deadliness of the illness and with little tools to stop the contagion, countries resorted to draconian measures: borders were closed, and terrestrial, maritime, and aerial spaces were subjected to unprecedented controls. Most governments declared a state of emergency followed by the adoption of exceptional measures aimed at limiting mobility, eventually establishing a health surveillance system, with curfews, mandatory quarantines, tracing apps and massive testing (French and Torin 2020). Meanwhile, chaotic and alarmist press coverage, coupled with aggressive nationalist political declarations contributed to creating a climate of suspicion, division and mistrust (Hart, Chinn, and Soroka 2020; Woods et al. 2020). Although all kinds of mobility were initially restricted and all bodies were targeted, this process has been neither even nor has targeted everybody in the same way (Adey et al. 2021; Cresswell 2021; Mezzadra and Stierl 2020; Pool 2023). From the very beginning, the mobility of unprivileged people from the Global South was identified as being more problematic than that of wealthy travellers from the Global North. Likewise, the presence of unwanted migrant bodies within countries has been perceived as more threatening in terms of virus transmission, and more unsettling in nature.

Indeed, the perception of contagion and risk during COVID-19 has been inherently political (Hardy 2020, 659), with the result of reinforcing an hegemonic discourse on differential mobilities (Cresswell 2010) and differential inclusions (Andrijasevic 2009; Pool 2023; Vosko 2022) invoking health in order to exclude the usual suspects. While previous scholarship has offered important insights into how migration has been securitised in different context, my contribution aims at bringing out the racialised and gendered logics that underpinned the portrayal of migrants¹ as a health security threat, using the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy as a case in point. Far from being new, the securitising discourse that emerges from my analysis is part and parcel of a colonial repertoire as infectious diseases have been recognised as central to histories of colonialism and nationalism, with epidemiology and science that oftentimes rationalise and justify racialised exclusions (Bashford 2007). Starting from this premise, the argument that I set forth is that securitising moves during COVID-19 have been rendered possible through the racialised and gendered representation of migrant bodies as pathogen agents that both risk contaminating an otherwise ‘pure white population’ and drain up already scarce resources at times of emergency. Shifting the focus from securitisation moves themselves, this article aims to explore the underlying grids of intelligibility that form the foundation of securitisation. These frameworks not only facilitate but also make securitising speech acts recognisable and relatable to an audience whose thinking is rooted in European colonial modernity (Mignolo 2011) wherein race and gender play an integral role.

Although the perception of migrants as a threat to the security of the nation is a long-debated issue, following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, security priorities of countries drastically shifted, and human mobility has been moved to the top of the agenda as never before. As observed by some, migrant populations embody the contradictions and tensions surrounding the freedom of movement and its denial during the pandemic (Mezzadra and Stierl 2020), as the measures adopted have been incoherent, selective and based on a purely gendered and racialised understanding of the threat, by targeting disproportionately some bodies and spaces (Sekalala and Rawson 2020). After all, the discourse around migrants’ mobility exposed how restrictions were never about who was actually sick, but rather about who was constructed as sick. In this sense, the ‘sick bodies’ were also the ones considered ‘illegal’ and ‘alien’, those black bodies whose mobility has always been problematic. Indeed, the decision to react to the pandemic by closing borders, restricting movement, targeting and isolating certain subjects in the name of health must be considered a deliberate political choice that worked for the maintenance of gendered and racialised hierarchies of mobility. This is certainly not a new phenomenon, as migrants have been historically stigmatised for carrying the disease (O’Brien and Eger 2020; Von Unger, Scott, and Odukoya 2019; White 2020). However, what is really striking during Covid-19, is the pervasiveness and powerfulness of this discourse, and its potential long-term effects (Tazzioli and Stierl 2021; Triandafyllidou 2020).

In the next sections, I will introduce the theoretical arguments that help situate my findings within broader academic debates as well as the methods and materials used. In the remaining of the article, I will present the results of my research by thoroughly examining the discourses around migration and mobility in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, I will show how the conceptualisation of migrants as a threat to human health is informed by racialised and gendered logics that revolved around 4 main discursive frames, which had the effect of encouraging and legitimising violent and exclusionary practices towards migrants in the name of health: 1) the virus as a foreign threat; 2) migrants as diseased bodies; 3) migrants as a burden; 4) migrants as racialised hypermasculine bodies.

Migration and Covid-19: security, health, race and gender

During the last two decades, as many Western countries have witnessed a rise in the inflow of migrants, the concept of securitisation, understood as a ‘wider process of threat production through which migration is linked with various forms of insecurity’ (Squire 2015, 26) has sparked great interest in scholars of both migration and security studies (Amoore 2006; Bigo 2002; Boswell 2007; Huysmans and Squire 2009; Squire 2015; Stierl 2020; Walters 2006). Generally speaking, migration has been securitised with reference to three key aspects: national identity, national security and welfare (Huysmans 2000). As theorised by the ideologues of the securitisation theory, the primary referent object for the securitisation of migration is national identity (Waever et al. 1993). In this sense, the ‘us’ vs ‘them’ dynamic is replicated in a conflictual and hierarchical way as migrants are depicted as a danger to the cultural homogeneity of the nation. Besides, migration is often portrayed as a danger to public order, as migrants are demonised and associated with criminal or terrorist activities (Bourbeau 2011; Huysmans 2000). Furthermore, migrants have often been securitised as an economic threat (Heizmann and Huth 2021; Huysmans 2000) as they are accused of driving down wages, ‘stealing’ jobs to the native population and taking advantage of the welfare state (Geddes 2003; Huysmans 2000).

Departing from a narrow focus on securitisation theory itself, this article is instead inspired by those critical debates that seek to comprehend the fundamental logics underlying securitisation. Crucially, these logics are deeply rooted in the racial and colonial dichotomy of the ‘civilised West’ vs the ‘barbarian non-West’, according to which migrants are backwards, intellectually inferior and violent. During the pandemic, although these discourses largely persisted, they have been reshaped along the new frame of health security (Elias et al. 2021; Reny and Barreto 2020), with migration being considered primarily a threat to the health of the body politic (Purnell 2021; Vearey, Grunchy, and Maple 2021). Far from being a complete novelty, the representation of migrants as a health threat is grounded in the same racialised and gendered discourses on the circulation and presence of unprivileged bodies that long predated the pandemic. This represents an interesting aspect for two reasons. On the one hand, it signals the continuation of the same practices of differential exclusion with other means, demonstrating that securitisation is first and foremost about racial and gendered logics that can be expressed by different discursive frames (migrants as a threat to culture, economy, safety, health). On the other hand, by using health as a justification for violent and exclusionary practices, securitising discourses found a new impetus by concealing the racial and gendered logics that underpinned the establishment of certain policies under the supposed neutrality of epidemiology.

The racial and gendered foundations of securitisation have been analysed by a rich body of scholarship (Baker 2021; Bertrand 2018; Gentry and Shepherd 2019; Goldberg 2009; Gomes and Marques 2021; Gray and Franck 2019; Howell and Richter-Montpetit 2020; Ibrahim 2005; Manchanda 2021; Moffette and Vadasaria 2016; Stachowitsch and Sachseder 2019; Tickner 2002). It is from this vantage point that this article engages with securitisation theory, as it thoroughly examines and illuminates the foundational role of gender and race in constructing migration as a health threat during the pandemic. In particular, my research aligns with Moffette and Moffette and Vadasaria’s 2016 claim that the very securitisation process ‘builds upon already established grids of intelligibility intrinsically connected to the project of race’ (3). Following their line of reasoning, the securitisation of migration is not a departure from the normal political order towards exceptional measures, but is actually a ‘political technology that lifts the inhibition of racist [and gendered] violence that is always lurking in the shadow of racialised modern civility, allowing for an increase in anti-migrant violence while at the same time consolidating the fantasy of liberal tolerance and white civility’ (7). Furthermore, this article draws inspiration from the extensive analysis conducted on gendered power relations in the construction of security threats (Cohn 1987; Enloe 2007; Hansen 2000; Wibben 2011). Crucially, many have investigated how gender, along with race, shape ideas and understandings of security through the use of binaries such as feminine/masculine, civilised/barbarian, active/passive, healthy/unhealthy, saviour/victim (Gentry and Shepherd 2019; Gray and Franck 2019; Tickner 2002). In this sense, gender and race are inextricably connected as modes of colonial relations of discrimination, oppression and control (Crenshaw 1989; Nagel 2003) as Western, masculine and progressive values are privileged over feminine, backwards and underdeveloped non-Western ones (Gentry and Shepherd 2019, 40).

Indeed, debates around security, migration, health, race and gender long predate the pandemic and are part and parcel of a colonial political strategy for managing bodies considered as pathogen agents (Bashford 2007). As numerous scholars have demonstrated, the racialisation of diseases is a phenomenon in which black bodies are often depicted as being at a higher risk of carrying illnesses and as inherently more contagious compared to white bodies (Hobbs 2021; Horner and Rule 2013; Pelizza 2020; Schnikel 2021; Sirleaf 2020; Stachowitsch and Sachseder 2019; Voelkner 2011; Von Unger, Scott, and Odukoya 2019). In this sense, the classification and control of black bodies become fundamental to protect both the bodies of the locals and the metaphorical body of the nation. This idea is deeply gendered and sexualised as black bodies are both considered a threat to white bodies, especially white women (Collins 2004) and diseased bodies that imperil the purity of the nation by penetrating the body polity (Scheibelhofer 2012, 325). Besides, these discourses have an inherent biopolitical dimension based on the use of race and gender as a mode of managing unwanted populations. This discourse appeals directly to biopolitical racism, a concept developed by Foucault (2003) and employed by several scholars in relation to migration (Elbe 2005; Ibrahim 2005). In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the population is divided into healthy subjects whose life deserves to be preserved, and unhealthy subjects that carry the disease and whose life can (and should) be sacrificed. Furthermore, several authors have looked at how measures adopted during pandemics are deeply shaped by gendered logics (Bloodsworth-Lugo and Lugo-Lugo 2019; Jansson 2017; Kuteleva and Clifford 2021; Palmer and Peterson 2020; Reny and Barreto 2020; Wenham 2021). In particular, some have looked at the militarised responses to health security threats showing how gendered structures are at the basis of ideas and practices of security (Bloodsworth-Lugo and Lugo-Lugo 2019; Branicki 2020; Jansson 2017). Analysing the Zika virus, Wenham (2021) illustrates the implications of a gendered response to health issues, such as the further marginalisation of women and the normalisation of violence through the deployment of military means. Importantly, during Covid-19, feminist scholars have warned about the dangers of addressing a health issue through militarised language and practices (Enloe 2020).

Positioning myself within this critical literature, I contend that the securitisation of migration along racial and gendered lines is not to be understood as a novelty and a departure from the everyday management of migrants’ bodies, but rather a continuation of violent oppression through other means. In this sense, the COVID-19 pandemic legitimised and naturalised certain exclusionary practices by rendering violence against black bodies more acceptable, as exclusion did not happen along clear discriminatory lines, but relied on the use of apparently neutral health concerns to uphold and strengthen pre-existing discriminations. Put differently, under the banner of epidemiology, states managed to hide violence claiming they were pursuing an apparent neutral goal, that of protecting health. Moreover, pitting the mobility of migrants against the health of the ‘native’ population reduced the moral space of dissent regarding the treatment of black bodies, relegating migrants’ health primarily to a matter of border controls and security, rather than a matter of migrants’ wellbeing. This was made possible, as I will show in the next section, through the mobilisation of gendered and racialised logics that are part and parcel of the Italian colonial repertoire (Pesarini 2020; Ponzanesi 2016).

Setting the scene: contextualising securitised discourses in Italy

Securitised discourses and practices in relation to migration and COVID-19 have been prominent both at the international and national level. This is especially visible in the Italian context, as Italy was the first European country to be hit by the pandemic, with significant loss of life and socio-economic consequences. This led to the implementation of some of the strictest regulations in the Western world, often accompanied by discriminatory measures against migrants (Ambrosini2020, 2021; Giammarinaro and Palumbo 2020; Montagna 2023).

On top of that, the regulation of incoming mobility, particularly those forms of mobility considered ‘illegal’, was a hotly debated topic in the country long before the pandemic. In this sense, Italian political debates surrounding migration have been highly polarised and marked by xenophobia and racism for some time (Bello 2021; Binotto 2020; Casaglia and Coletti 2021; Colombo 2018; Sciortino and Asher 2004; Siddi 2020). Numerous studies consistently highlight the long-standing portrayal of migration as a security threat in political discourse and media representations, often depicting migrants as a menace to national security and the cultural cohesion of the nation. What distinguishes the pandemic period is that it served as an accelerator, intensifying and magnifying pre-existing dynamics (Perocco 2021), through what some scholars called the ‘Covid excuse’ (Stierl and Dadusc 2022). This agonistic rhetoric towards migrants reached unprecedented levels in Italian political and media communication (Giacomelli, Musarò, and Parmiggiani 2020) employing scientific justifications to legitimise harsher and more discriminatory treatments of migrants in relation to health and epidemiology (Stierl and Dadusc 2022). These measures have been supported by drawing upon racialised and gendered logics, which helped construct migrants as disposable bodies, thus raising the threshold for acceptable discourses and practices of discrimination.

Indeed, the successful mobilisation of such logics must be situated within the broader framework of Italy’s history of colonialism and its colonial repertoire, where gender and race have been central (Pesarini 2020; Ponzanesi 2016). As noted by scholars (Griffini 2022; Siddi 2020) the anti-immigration rhetoric in Italy is permeated by a colonial discourse that depicts immigrants as ‘criminalised’, ‘inferiorized’, and ‘abjectified’ (Griffini 2022, 1), and COVID-19 discourse is no exception.

Against this backdrop, the Italian case provides researchers with a unique perspective to scrutinise the underlying racialised and gendered logics involved in constructing migrants as a health threat. While my findings are specific to Italy, the striking similarities with the dominant discourse observed worldwide (United Nations 2020) make this study a valuable starting point for exploring other cases. Indeed, Italy is part of a broader discourse where migration is securitised and understood through gendered and racialised frameworks in Europe (De Genova 2018; Gray and Franck 2019; Gupta and Virdee 2018; Tazzioli 2021a) and beyond (Ibrahim 2005). Therefore, although the results of this study are specific to the Italian case, the parallels with the global discourse make this research a pertinent foundation for future investigations.

Methods and material

Both popular newspapers and prominent politicians had a leading role in shaping much of the discourse on migrants in relation to the spread of the virus, producing and reproducing some bodies as a threat to health security for over a year (Giampaolo and Ianni 2020). Thus, to uncover the racialised and gendered logics that stand at the basis of these securitising moves, I analysed those speech acts (Buzan, Weaver, and Wilde 1998) that mostly shaped migrants’ perception between 2020 and 2021. In order to identify the 15 most widely spread Italian online newspaper across the whole political spectrum,² I used two accredited classifications (Accertamenti Diffusione Stampa³ and AUDIweb⁴). As for political actors, I focused on speeches and posts by national Ministers, Members of Parliament, and some regional governors of the areas most affected by both COVID-19 and the inflow of migrants. In a period between January 2020 and April 2021, which ostensibly cover the peak of the pandemic in Italy, I examined around 700 speeches, articles, official documents and social media posts directed exclusively at a domestic audience. Although the period covered correspond to different phases of border closures and pandemic-related measures in Italy, the analysis of the speech acts has revealed a lack of change in the alarming rhetoric employed against certain bodies. Indeed, this consistent pattern reinforces the notion that a securitising discourse was employed regardless of the actual risk of contagion and maintained a constant level of alertness throughout the entire period analysed.

Table

Online Newspapers	N° analyzed articles	Political actors (Ministers, MPs and regional governors)
Il Corriere	50	N° analyzed speeches	N° Facebook & Twitter posts
Repubblica	50	49	24
La Stampa	50
Il Messaggero	50
Libero	50
Il Fatto Quotidiano	50
Il Giornale	50
Avvenire	20
Ansa	50
TGCOM24	30
Quotidiano Nazionale	30
Il Resto del Carlino	30
La Nazione	50
Il Mattino	50
Fanpgae.it	30

To select the relevant sources, I looked for speech acts that directly or indirectly linked the phenomenon of migration and human mobility with the pandemic. In particular, I used the combination of the words ‘immigrants’, ‘migration’, ‘covid’, ‘virus’, ‘security’ using online search engines and various databases, such as the websites of the various newspapers and the website of the Italian government. Furthermore, I used Twitter and Facebook advanced search to look for relevant posts from prominent political representatives. Because my sampling was restricted by the requirements of availability online, I cannot claim that my analysis covers all potentially relevant sources. However, given the variety and number of sources analysed, I believe it to be representative enough to allow me to identify recurrent patterns and uncover underlying logics. All the speeches were originally in Italian and the samples presented in the text are translated by the author. The coding approach has been largely inductive and exploratory: while closely reading the collected samples I considered which themes were in evidence, which patterns replicated and what was the overall underlying logic on which they relied. After coding the speech acts, I grouped the codes into larger clusters based on similarity in content and I searched for themes. In this sense, my analysis does not aim at simply summarising each frame but attempts to uncover the broader knowledge implied by every code, as language is never an objective representation of the world, but it is rather used as a powerful political and social tool to shape reality (Stachowitsch and Sachseder 2019). In this sense, the primary research method employed is content analysis coupled with critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1989). The use of these two techniques allowed me to first identify what I read as the most significant framings of certain kinds of human mobility as a threat to human health, to then delve into a more robust analysis of the underlying gendered and racialised logics at play. In this sense, the focus of this article is not on the securitised speech acts themselves, but rather on the underlying logics that inform and drive them. In an inductive coding process, I have identified 4 dominant frames that contribute to reinforcing the perception of migrants as a security risk related to human health according to pre-existing gendered and racialised logics (the virus as a foreign threat; migrants as diseased bodies; migrants as a burden; migrants as racialised hypermasculine bodies). As I did not conduct a quantitative analysis, the selection of these 4 prominent frames do not rely on a quantitative assessment of how many times a particular frame appears in the newspapers analysed, rather my qualitative approach aimed at identifying what I read as the most significant discourse that emerged, allowing me to rely on the interpretation of context and meaning.

The first two frames identified predominantly emerge from a securitising rhetoric which is directed against the mobility of migrants and primarily revolves around border closures. This rhetoric perpetuates the notion that migrants are a ‘sick population’ that poses a risk of contaminating an otherwise ‘healthy population’. On the other hand, the latter two frames emerge from a securitising rhetoric which is directed against the presence of migrants within Italian territory, fuelling the belief that they deplete already scarce resources during times of emergency and pose a threat to public social order. As a result, frame one and two centre around differential mobility and employ gendered and racialised rhetoric to impose restrictions on the movement of specific individuals. Conversely, frame three and four centre around differential inclusion and utilise gendered and racialised rhetoric to marginalise and exclude bodies whose presence within the nation is deemed illegitimate.

In doing so, the present contribution focuses on analysing the underlying logics that legitimised violence and exclusion at the level of discourse, rather than demonstrating the extent to which these were followed by concrete measures. However, it is important to acknowledge the tangible effects of these narratives, as they have significantly influenced the interpretation of events and the development of solutions. These have been documented by an extensive scholarly literature that have shown how the measures adopted have further marginalised and made vulnerable the bodies of female and male migrants in Italy (Ambrosini 2021; Montagna 2023; Tazzioli 2021b; Tazzioli and Stierl 2021).

Four discursive frames on migration and Covid-19

When in January 2020 the Chinese city of Wuhan declared the state of emergency for the insurgence of a mysterious pneumonia, many states in the West preferred to dwell in the fantasy that the disease would not be their problem. This is perhaps best exemplified by the declaration of an Italian representative at a G20 meeting ‘we have nothing to do with [Covid-19]. It is a yellow people’s disease, not ours’ (Pan 2020, 3). Nevertheless, to protect its territory from the virus, Italy was the first European country to ban all flights from China on 31 January 2020. However, this measure did not stop the virus from spreading: a day after the ban two Chinese tourists in Rome tested positive to Covid-19. From that moment on, the focus of the Italian government was to track and isolate potentially contagious people, until surveillance and control measures reached a peak in March 2020.

During the spread of the disease, media coverage coupled with political declarations and expert opinions greatly shaped the perception of the threat, creating a causal link between (certain kinds of) bodies and health security. Although not all analysed speech acts were deliberately intended to produce migration as a threat to human health, the prominent discourse created an emergency account of the migratory phenomenon using racialised and gendered logics. Against this backdrop, it is worth noting that right-wing newspapers and politicians were much more likely to explicitly connect COVID-19 with migration through discourses imbued with gendered and racialised assumptions. Despite this, similarities and recurrent patterns were found across the whole political spectrum. As the following analysis will demonstrate, a hegemonic discourse took over any attempt to debate the notion that migrants are, in fact, a health risk. The dominant discourses are rooted in a set of discriminatory, racialised and gendered logics that can be grouped into four prominent frames: 1) the virus as a foreign threat; 2) migrants as diseased bodies; 3) migrants as a burden; 4) migrants as racialised hypermasculine bodies.

1) The foreign threat: shielding Italy from an external lethal danger

One of the most prominent frames that emerges from the analysis is the characterisation of the virus as a ‘foreign threat’. Portraying the disease as a threat coming from the outside serves to confine the threat to a specific geographical space, implying that the nation is fighting against a foreign enemy (Casaglia 2021; Wang, Zou, and Liu 2020). A perfect example of this is how COVID-19 was initially labelled as a ‘Chinese virus’, with the clear intention of taking distance from the disease through racialised logics of bio-orientalism (Kong 2019). Once it became obvious that the illness was spreading all around the world, albeit stopping to call it the ‘Chinese virus’, Italian media, politicians and health authorities began to label the virus variants according to the territory where they were first identified. Newspapers and politicians started to talk about ‘English variant’, ‘South African variant’, ‘Brazilian variant’, ‘Indian variant’ and ‘Nigerian variant’. This language attached a racial signature to the virus, reinforcing the idea of the pandemic as a racialised health emergency that was to blame mostly on some people and some territories. As a result, Italy adopted massive surveillance and restrictive measures against people coming from ‘risky’ countries or belonging to ‘risky’ ethnic and national groups. Furthermore, this language caused resentment and fear towards people associated with these groups, leading to several racist and xenophobic episodes (La Stampa 2020b February 2). Identifying the virus with specific foreign ethnicities or nationalities puts in place a process of othering that reinforces the notion that the virus is brought by ‘outsiders’ that constitute a threat to the health of Italian citizens. As such, the COVID-19 pandemic revived colonial imaginaries about the directionality of illnesses and racialised hierarchies of diseases (Sirleaf 2020). The idea of the virus as something foreign, was also reinforced by expressions such as ‘imported covid-cases’, used extensively by media outlets, politicians but also the scientific community. This greatly contributed to the stigmatisation of certain populations and territories.

The gendered and racialised logics through which unwanted foreign bodies were filtered out during the pandemic were most evident at the border. In the case of emerging diseases, borders separate the sick from the non-sick, relying on strategies of avoidance, segregation and establishment of sanitary cordons (King 2002, 772). Whereas citizens of some black-listed countries (Van Houtum 2010) were kept out at every cost, Italian citizens and tourists were allowed to cross the border. Declarations such as ‘the virus comes from abroad’ (Vista 2020 August 17) imply that national borders can protect an uncontaminated and healthy population from contagious foreigners that want to penetrate the nation. Besides being very gendered and racialised (Khalid 2017), this mentality largely disregards the fact that national borders cannot contain a menace that is global in nature and that is transmitted primarily by the airborne route. Indeed, the reproduction of certain human mobilities perceived as threatening the life of Italian citizens created a false sense of safety according to the misleading, yet appealing idea that the danger is coming from the outside and not from within. However, in constructing a sealed border against the virus, both politicians and newspaper discourses have played a primary role in establishing which subjects had to be bordered and contained the most. As a matter of fact, the process of othering did not apply equally to all foreigners, as an alarming tone is used mostly (although not exclusively) for the mobility of migrants and those coming from the Global South (Ambrosini 2020; Tazzioli 2021b; Tazzioli and Stierl 2021). In this sense, differential treatment happened along pre-existing racial classification. During the timeframe analysed, newspapers, official documents and declarations from both politicians and experts made an explicit distinction between ‘foreigners’ and ‘migrants’, considering the latter as a separate racialised category, different from all other privileged foreigners that came to Italy during the pandemic, such as leisure or business travellers. This language revived stereotypical colonial imaginations about the disease coming from poorer or less developed areas. Indeed, foreign tourists were not generally considered a menace, but they were even encouraged to come to Italy.

Sentences like ‘Tourists can’t go to their second home but migrants keep arriving (Il Giornale 2020i April 2)’ or political declarations like ‘it is unacceptable that migrants mix with tourists (Il Fatto Quotidiano 2020b August 24)’ emphasise the racialised differentiation between people on the move. ‘Healthy’ tourists are welcomed while ‘unhealthy’ migrants are stigmatised and marginalised. Within this framework, the differentiation between mobilities also happened along moral lines, with some bodies ‘guilty’ of spreading the virus. Here the proximity of differently racialised bodies (tourists and nationals on the one hand, and migrants on the other) acts as a catalyser for the spread of the disease. This racialised hierarchization underpinned border closures adopted in Italy in an attempt to stop the spread of the ‘foreign virus’. This has been evident, for instance, in the ways the pandemic was instrumentalized to declare Italian ports unsafe for migrants (Decree 2020 April 7), a measure that was considered excessive by several human rights organisations (Human Rights Watch 2020, April 9). However, sealing off borders proved to be ineffective, precisely because borders have never been closed for everybody: certain categories, such as citizens or tourists (albeit in a second moment) have always been allowed to cross them. Thus, at a closer look, securitisation in the name of containing the virus was based on racial and colonial logics to filter out unwanted forms of mobility. This became clear in the spring of 2020 when the government decided to apply a selective filter to labour mobility from certain areas previously considered ‘unhealthy’ given the massive shortage of foreign farm workers. The mobility of some foreigners otherwise considered ‘a risk’ was justified purely on utilitarian and neoliberal terms, as these same bodies were considered both a risk and a resource for the society.

2) Migrants as diseased bodies: plague spreaders wanted

Indeed, black bodies have long been subjected to colonial and racist violence that materialises especially at the border, and the territorial measures adopted during the pandemic reiterated the hierarchy of racist and colonial values that define the value of human life according to one’s geographical origin (Tazzioli 2021a). In this sense, the securitisation of migration promoted and reinforced a world view based on the dichotomy of the ‘Western healthy populations’ vs the ‘contagious others’ (Vearey, Grunchy, and Maple 2021). Approaching the spring and summer of 2020, discourses around the threat posed by arrival by sea experienced a significant increase. Some of the most recurring elements in the analysed speech acts are both daily reports on ‘uncontrolled’ arrivals and the alarming accounts of migrants testing positive to Covid-19. In some instances, the daily count of Covid cases per region explicitly signalled the number of sick migrants, with sentences like ‘42 new cases in Sicily, 5 migrants’ (Repubblica 2020 August 13). Naturally, these ways of separating migrants from the rest of the population reinforced a sense of othering. Furthermore, the word ‘migrant’, or in some cases its derogatory synonym ‘clandestine’, has been often coupled with negative adjectives such as ‘infectious’, ‘contagious’, ‘positive to Covid-19’, or ‘sick’. Some discourses explicitly linked migrants’ mobility and contagion: ‘Migrants come from the other side of the sea and bring Covid with them’ (Il Giornale 2020d July 31); ‘Migration routes are a risk’ (La Stampa 2020a March 18); ‘there is a risk of a new COVID-19 upsurge caused by migrants coming illegally into Italy’ (Il Fatto Quotidiano 2020b July 28); “Covid travels on migrants’ boats like in business class” (Il Messaggero 2020 August 4). Even several Ministries, including the former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, went as far as explicitly considering migrants a ‘health risk’ that Italy could not afford to take (La Stampa 2020a March 8; Il; Corriere della Sera 1989 July 27). By associating the virus with migrants coming from Africa, Italy is trying to distance itself from the sick Global South plagued by social and health malaise. These discourses have also been supported by expert knowledge, as some virologists seemed to suggest that migrants coming from Africa should in fact be a concern (Il Messaggero 2020 August 4; Mattino 2020 July 27). Besides, restrictions also applied to migrants legally residing in Italy. During the summer of 2020, about a hundred Latin Americans and Asians with regular residence permits were detained for up to 4 days at the airports of Milan and Rome (Il Fatto Quotidiano 2020a October 13).

Another recurring discourse was that of Covid outbreaks in migrant reception centres in several Italian cities and the risk of contagion for local communities. As some migrants were transferred from one reception centre to another, some newspapers and politicians voiced the fear that they might spread contagion. The right-wing politician Matteo Salvini went as far as blaming migrants for bringing the virus to previously uncontaminated areas: ‘Thanks to the transfer of 22 migrants that tested positive to Covid-19, Basilicata is no more Covid free’ (Il Giornale 2020a July 22). The threat was perceived as intrinsically belonging to certain bodies, reiterating and strengthening the exclusion of migrants to protect the life and health of Italians. This closely resembles the concept of pathologized mobility (Cresswell 2021) according to which some mobile bodies are considered pathogens. Following this logic, migrants’ mobility was defined as deviant, reinforcing already existing differential mobility regimes: Italian ports were declared unsafe for migrants, flights from certain geographical areas came to a complete halt and people coming from some specific countries were tested and subjected to quarantine. Generally speaking, the permission to travel to Italy was based on a discriminatory classification of countries according to the statistical incidence of the virus. While everybody’s mobility was arguably limited, the wealthiest and most privileged travellers have always been allowed to move (Pool 2023).

At the same time, the causal link between migrant mobility and the spread of contagion was reinforced through the use of a heavily militarised language that normalised and legitimised violent solutions. The idea of waging a war against the virus (Enloe 2020; Wenham 2021) and protecting the nation through military means is indeed a sign of the gendered logics that sustain the securitisation of migration. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, as military means are unlikely to be able to stop the virus, the violence was instead directed towards those bodies that impersonated the virus. Some of the most powerful expressions used by media outlets referred to COVID-19 as a ‘contagious bomb coming from Africa’ and a ‘skilled sniper with foreign bullets’ (Il Fatto Quotidiano 2020c July 13). These discourses promote the idea that migrants’ sick bodies are dangerous enemies to be defeated through military means. Crucially, the use of a militarised language amplifies the risk and frames it in life-threatening terms suggesting that the emergency should be addressed with means other than civilian ones. As the military metaphor reinforced the idea of a territory to be defended against contagious enemies, Italian authorities deployed the military to deal with the sanitary emergency connected to migrants’ arrivals (in particular to control and surveil migrants during their quarantine periods), ultimately pushing for more nationalistic and violent responses to the inflow of migrants. Indeed, privileging military responses means normalising ideas of power linked with aggressive masculinities in attempts to protect the homeland from black bodies (Gentry and Shepherd 2019).

3) Migrants as a burden and welfare profiteers: Italians first

The third recurring frame concerns the perception of migrants as a burden. Although this rhetoric is by no means new, during the pandemic it took on a more urgent meaning according to the idea that Italy cannot afford to take care of migrants in such difficult times. Not only are they carrying the disease in a literal sense, but they are also a disease for the welfare state. Along with the previously analysed frames, prominent discourses promoted a sort of ‘health chauvinism’ (Haderup and Schaeffer 2021), suggesting that healthcare should be granted only to nationals. This sentiment of exasperated nationalism has been observed throughout the whole period analysed as migrants were perceived to encroach upon scarce resources that should have been directed exclusively towards Italians. Sentences like ‘ship to quarantine migrants might cost 1 million’ (Il Giornale 2020e April 12); ‘Hotels are closed for sick people but are open to migrants’ (Libero 2020 October 27); ‘Coronavirus and cuts to healthcare: the money was spent for migrants’ (Il Giornale 2020c March 5); or ‘Italy is the only country that welcomes contagious migrants’ (Il Giornale 2021 March 25) promote the idea that migrants are welfare free-riders that are draining already scarce resources and that only citizens should benefit from healthcare. Although migrants have been previously accused of taking advantage of Italian welfare, given that during the pandemic public healthcare was in severe distress, this idea gained momentum.

These discourses show that differential access to healthcare during the pandemic also happened along racist lines, suggesting that the health and life of Italians is more important than that of migrants. By framing migrants as the ‘others’, securitising discourses draw on colonial rhetoric to legitimise subordination and justify the enjoyment of some rights only by Italian citizens. During the pandemic this process of othering was reinforced as ‘the immigrant other’ was denied basic social and legal rights, from the right to seek asylum in Italy, to the right to health and vaccination. This has been evident, for instance, in the huge difficulties migrants experienced in getting access to vaccination (The New York Times, 3 June 2021). At the same time, some discourses seemed to suggest a somewhat indulgent treatment towards migrants. In particular, the two most prominent right-wing politicians, Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini, which together make up almost half of the Italian electorate, declared inadmissible that Italians had to respect social distancing while migrants could allegedly come to Italy and violate containment measures. One of the analysed sources went as far as suggesting that while Italians were patiently waiting to receive their vaccination, some migrants would skip the queue to get the vaccine before Italian citizens (Il Giornale 2020f April 19). These discourses reinforced the idea of migrants as welfare profiteers and pointed towards a general delegitimization of their presence in the country.

4) Racialized hypermasculitinities: between fantasies of presumed immunity and barbaric behaviors

A fourth and last discourse identified was the racialised hypermasculinity that underpinned the representation of migrants’ bodies. The gendered language used by politicians, the media and health authorities reveal how migrants were both described as people of extraordinary and exaggerated physical energy, and violent barbarians. At the beginning of the spread of the virus, and in some instances throughout the whole period analysed, some speech acts seemed to suggest directly or indirectly that migrants might be immune from the virus or not as vulnerable as Italians: ‘Contagion? It is not the same for everybody. Few cases among migrants’ (Il Giornale 2020b March 25); ‘Africans immune to the virus? Only a hypothesis […] few black people are hospitalised with Covid-19’ (Huffington Post 2020 March 24). These discourses come from a neo-colonial logic according to which the black body is characterised by an exaggerated vitality and virility that can resist anything, even a lethal disease. These supposedly innate gendered and racial differences between black and white people’s bodies have permeated medical discourse for a long time (i.e Hogart 2019) and have emerged powerfully during the pandemic (Carter and Sanford III 2020; Vaughn et al. 2021). In other cases, discourses were used to legitimate migrants’ exclusion, downplaying their vulnerability to the virus because ‘they are young and healthy’ (Adnkronos 2020, July 20). Denying migrants of vulnerability also produced an inverted humanitarian logic for which they are not victims in need of saving, but rather a source of disruption to national order. Moreover, as observed by some authors (Pelizza 2020), such discourses foster hate and suspicion, as they reiterate the distinction between ‘us’ suffering from the virus, and an immune ‘them’. Instead of putting migrants in a privileged position, their presumed immunity reproduces their irreducible alterity, making them almost allies of the virus against the native population. Moreover, the analysed speech acts never refer to migrant women, children or elderly, but generally use the term ‘migrant’ as a synonym for single and able-bodied young men. In this sense migrants’ masculinity is constructed as violent and embedded with deviant agency, in contrast with peaceful and passive femininity (Wibben 2016). Indeed, portraying dangerous foreign bodies as “young male migrants’ bodies” serves to amplify the danger they pose to the local population and reduces the space for empathy, as they are constructed as inferior, savage and unworthy of protection. Furthermore, failing to account for differences among migrants (with gender being one of the most prominent), could be intended as a further act of dispossession of black bodies: they are just a homogeneous foreign and diseased moving mass that is worth considering only by virtue of the threat it represents to white national bodies (Collins 2004). In this sense, the very humanity of migrants is questioned, as they are reduced to nothing more than pathogen agents with legs.

At the same time, the gendered exclusion of migrants’ bodies took place through a discourse that depicted them as dirty and violent. In mainstream narrative, foreign exuberant masculinities become synonyms of uncivilised and degenerated bodies that represent a threat to public social order (Scheibelhofer 2012). From a strictly sanitary point of view, depicting migrants as neglecting basic hygiene norms in comparison with the more hygienic nationals acted as a confirmation of their inherent contagious nature and of the exceptional threat that they represented: ‘There are no showers [in migration camps], people do not bathe. Almost nobody uses face masks’ (Il Giornale 2020g August 9). Besides, migrants are depicted as violent and neglectful of basic social distancing norms. Discourses like ‘They do what they want because they are not sanctioned […] they sit […] without protections and without respecting social distancing’ (Il Giornale 2020h April 21) contributed to representing migrants as ‘backwards’ and ‘uncivilised’, cultural aliens that live in a quasi-state of nature without consideration for social norms and responsibility. These bodies are a ‘danger’ because they do not conform to Western values, including acceptable social and hygienic norms. Furthermore, newspapers have given great space to the narration of riots and escapes of migrants during their quarantine, often describing violent episodes and fights with the police or doctors. Although these episodes have been few and isolated, the alarmist tone used gave the impression of a much broader phenomenon, and thus of a real emergency. Depicting migrants as violent reinforces the notion that they are primarily a threat, taking any notion of vulnerability out of the picture. Furthermore, as they are also ‘contagious bodies’, their undisciplined behaviour is considered to pose a threat to state officers that try to contain them for the greater good. As such, migrants’ uncontrolled and dangerous masculinities are contrasted to the state’s controlled and normalised violent masculinities represented by the military and the police. Taken together, these gendered discourses that depict migrants as immune from the virus, violent and undisciplined, produce and reproduce the colonial myth of the ‘deviant and hypermasculine savage’, which at times of a global pandemic acquires an even more threatening connotation, that of virus super-spreader.

Conclusions

In my analysis of Italian newspapers and politicians’ discourses during the pandemic I have shown how migrants’ bodies have been constructed as a threat to the health of the body politic through racialised and gender logics. As such, I have been able to render race and gender visible in the discourses on migration during Covid-19, defeating the notion that the measures adopted to fight the virus have been neutral and guided exclusively by the need for epidemic control. As I have argued throughout the paper, certain kinds of human mobility have been securitised along 4 main discursive frames that produced and reproduced a prejudiced narrative that portrayed migrants’ bodies as inherently more dangerous than Italian bodies. Migrants have been generally considered as a disease to the body politic both in a literal sense, as they have been accused of carrying the disease, and a metaphorical one, as they have been considered a disease for the welfare state and national order. Thus, during the analysed period, migrants were mostly framed as a threat not only because of their ‘illegality’, but because of their supposed illness. All in all, these discourses reinforced the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, producing and reproducing a hegemonic discourse of alterity in the name of health. Although the securitisation of non-white bodies along gender and racial logics is indeed part of the normal liberal order (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018), and the pandemic is no exception, what is interesting is the ways in which these pre-existing discourses have been reframed along biological lines, as migrants’ bodies have been created and recreate as inherently diseased.

This should draw scholarly interests for several reasons. Crucially, it shows how the securitisation of migration can stretch and adapt over new contexts by relying on the same gendered and racialised logics that are embedded in Western security discourses and practices. In this sense, the merging of health issues and international security raises important normative questions about the implications of responding to a global pandemic through the language and apparatuses of security. Indeed, framing migration as a health security emergency has triggered specific responses that have been having detrimental effects on both people on the move and migrants’ communities in Italy, worsening their often precarious and vulnerable conditions. Relatedly, the use of racialised and gendered logics that legitimised a differential treatment of unprivileged bodies have been rendered somewhat more acceptable by the fact that the entire world was facing one of the deadliest epidemics in history. This justified violence by making certain ‘healthy’ exclusionary practices necessary for the very preservation of life in Western societies. Crucially, under the banner of protecting health, certain lives have been confirmed as valuable and worthy of protection, whereas others have been (re)produced as disposable and worthy of being sacrificed for the greater good. As the pandemic is still unfolding, and as other pandemics are likely to unfold in the next decades, scholars should continue uncovering and challenging the racial and gendered assumptions that underpin Western security practices.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Annika Björkdahl, Priscyll Anctil Avoine, Claudia Caturegli and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Agnese Pacciardi

Agnese Pacciardi is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Lund (Sweden). Her research focuses on security, migration and border from critical perspectives.

Notes

1. Drawing inspiration from Sara Riva’s thought-provoking reflection in ‘Thickening the border: a transnational sovereign assemblage and the privatisation of sovereignty’, I have made a deliberate choice to use the term ‘migrant’ throughout this paper, consciously refraining from distinguishing between asylum seekers, migrants, and refugees. This decision stems from a political standpoint aimed at challenging the perspectives upheld by the state and preventing reinforcement of status disparities among individuals in motion. By transcending legal definitions and categorical divisions, the term ‘migrant’ in the context of this paper encompasses all foreign bodies that have been deemed undesirable and subjected to marginalisation and racialisation during the pandemic.

2. Il Giornale, Libero, Repubblica, La Stampa, Corriere della Sera, Avvenire, ANSA, TGCOM 24, Il Messaggero, Il Fatto Quotidiano, Quotidiano Nazionale, Il Resto del Carlino, La Nazione, Il Mattino, Fanpage.

3. https://www.adsnotizie.it/

4. http://www.audiweb.it/