Precarious Mobility and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Re-Examining Canada’s Migration-Security Nexus

It is an understatement to express that the COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the state of our world, with currently over 4 million confirmed deaths and over 200 million cases worldwide. One of the most predominantly impacted groups by the conditionalities of the coronavirus has been precarious status migrants, such as asylum seekers, refugees, and temporary foreign workers. The pandemic has triggered many securitized Western nation states to further fortify their borders. While citizenship regimes such as Canada claim to have an actively implemented “closed border policy”, the only individuals that have truly been systemically excluded from entering the country have been those with precarious status. This piece will revisit the Canadian migration-security nexus through a COVID-19 lens and will argue that the marginalization of precarious bodies and their mobility only reproduces the existing practices of the Canadian state to exclude refugees and migrants, using the pandemic as a justification to exercise exceptional power to securitize against them as the “undesirable” other.