The outbreak of the COVID pandemic has triggered multiple border closures across the world: every country has re-established a series of mobility restrictions, which include closures of airports, ports, land borders. In the span of two weeks, the Schengen space has de facto imploded, as EU member states have suspended free mobility indefinitely, and nobody knows how it will be reconfigured when the corona-crisis will be over. Together with states’ border closures, the pandemic has multiplied racialised and socio-economic borders.
Indeed, even if journalists and politicians insist that the virus does not discriminate among people, it is far from being borderless: the possibility of being treated properly in hospitals, of accessing care and of getting a safe space to stay and self-isolate varies hugely in fact, according to legal, economic and social factors.
I focus here on the Italian context, where, as is well known, a strict national lockdown was enforced on March 9. At the time of writing, the death toll has dramatically reached 15,362, and the numbers of people who have tested positive stands at 124,632 – although, as many have said, the number is likely to be much higher due to the poor testing policy.
