Failing to Protect Bare Life During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Forced Migrants as Carriers of the Virus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study compares the restriction of mobility of forced migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic between March 2020 and December 2021 in the United States and Ecuador. Based on the critical discourse analysis of anti-migrant rhetoric in press articles, migrant stories in the press, reports, and border control practices, I examine the Ecuadorian government’s response to the migration flow of Venezuelans and the United States’ enforcement practices against Central American asylum seekers. By exploring Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life, I argue that this failure to protect forced migrant’s rights is due to the United States’ and Ecuador’s representations of forced migrants as bare life and carriers of the virus, justifying xenophobia and resistance to humanitarian international law. By drawing on a feminist intersectional approach, I add to recent research on the securitization of forced migration and challenge the race/ethnicity, immigration status, class, and nationality-based discrimination of the measures undertaken during the pandemic. I illustrate how the treatment of forced migrants as bare life was aggravated by their intersectional inequalities. I conclude by providing recommendations that could be considered by the U.S. and Ecuadorian governments to protect the right to freedom of mobility.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".