Entry Denied: COVID-19, Race, Migration, and Global Health

This essay examines “how the racialization of diseases is reflected in historical and ongoing United States’ migration law and policy as well as the global health law regime.” The author argues that there has been “a long history of othering and denigrating Black, Indigenous and other people of color as infection-prone, afflicted with exotic sicknesses and generally unhealthy.” She provides a brief history of the “othering” of selected populations in the US, using as examples, syphilis (Blacks), cholera and smallpox (Chinese), HIV/AIDS (Haitians), and COVID-19 (Latinx migrant workers). These groups often have experienced invasive and humiliating medical inspections, migration shutdowns, detention, and stigmatization. The author reviews how “containing racialized threats of disease contagion from colonized peoples” led to “the creation of an international system of quarantine regulations.” The International Sanitary Conventions of 1892, 1897, 1903, 1912, 1926, and 1944, and related treaties required notification for cases of cholera, plague, yellow fever, smallpox, and typhus, and were shaped primarily by the fear of imported disease by people in Western countries. After reviewing the principles that guided the establishment of the World Health Organization (WHO), the author discusses WHO’s power to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), including the ways in which the US and other countries racialized PHEIC responses to the Ebola outbreak in 2014-2015 and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The author acknowledges that while it’s important to understand “how the history of diseases and responses to diseases is linked to colonial and ongoing politics of racial exclusion,” there are many other factors along with race that influence migration and global public health law and policy. (Robert Like, MD, MS)

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