Migrant bodies as sites of nation-building

Belonging to a nation is a sense that some people experience proprioceptively. For

migrants, though, the concept of belonging changes drastically once the regulatory
bodies of the states that they enter into redefine not only their public, but also
personal and intimate lives. Yet migratory flows of people across the globe are a
constant practice that drives our histories and cultures. According to Edward Said,
we shall always recognize that these experiences are not uniform or autonomous;
they are amalgamations that have important social and political consequences (Said,
1993). Migration affects all aspects of people’s lives within the society. Newcomers
bring to the places they migrate their vitality, health and determination to contribute
to the building of the futures of the host countries to which they are eventually
willing to become citizens. They also bring the richness of their own cultures - thus
adding further diversification to the history of these societies - while contributing
their skills and energy towards the economic prosperity and development of the
host nations in the meantime (Rostami-Povey, 2007: 251).

All of that in exchange for the promise of better life opportunities that encourage
migrants to move around the globe. Lured by the symbolic visions of the futures
offered by some of the societies around the globe, which they can actively become
part of, many migrants, however, become subject to the existing global and political
economic inequalities.

Introduction

According to Barker and Horton, the social histories of public health reveal the
existence of an internal borderland of sorts in Western societies, like the United
States, throughout the 20th century and before. The discourses crafted about
immigrants’ proper place in the polity display the role of hygiene as a central focus
for the eugenic mechanisms of racial exclusion that were used to shape the sense of
civic membership of immigrants within the receiving societies (2009: 786). The
discourses that emerged at different historical moments stirred public fears and
anxieties about immigrants “fitness” and “deservingness” of citizenship.

Throughout history, immigrants’ position has been constructed as a potential source

of contagion from malicious diseases. Furthermore, immigrants have been
positioned as an extinction threat for the racially “white” population. This is due to
anxieties over who is reproducing at what rate across the globe and which social
groups are encouraged to reproduce, while others’ ability to have children have
been discouraged or even forcibly removed while the practices of parenting have
been morally questioned and judged, thus forming yet another fertile site for
investigating racial distinctions (Goldade, 2011: 547, Barker, 2009: 786).

Immigrants, especially those who occupy readily marginalized roles and face
structural disadvantages within their communities of origin, rarely manage to escape
this position even when the state manages to instill them into the society and grant
them with full citizenship rights. In most cases, it remains the context of the sending
community that subsequently predetermines the health outcomes of the
newcomers (Quesada et al., 2011).

Establishing that allows us to delve into ethnographic examples that extrapolate on

national ideologies of citizenship and belonging by tracing how states uphold their
moral and national identities based in safeguarding the health of its nationals, the
current politics of morality and practical effects of life under external regulations
enforced by the global health issues that challenge local decision-making processes.
At the same time, the “internal foreigners” - individuals whose bodies have
historically been formed into sites of contestation falling outside the composition of
the publicly assumed political body, and whose behavior is closely monitored against
the locally existing laws of moral and responsible conduct – still require health care
and constitute the labor force responsible for the growth of the national economy
(Barker, 2009: 787, Goldade 2009).

The focus of public health strategies has been increasingly shifting from the coercive
quarantines that took place in the 20 th century to more recent idioms of individual
self-governance, which seemingly distanced themselves from eugenic measures of
racial hygiene and pollution to neoliberal reforms of self-discipline and self-
responsibility (Rose, 2007). However, a new era was defined when the mass
proliferation of COVID-19, a viral entity that regards no borders, hit the headlines
(Provencio, 2020).

Given that public anxieties have now shifted towards the novel virus as one of our
latest contemporary global concerns, the way public health strategies mitigated this
phenomenon has also disclosed the latest definitions of political membership in the
nations across the world. Drawing on the ethnographic account from Natsha
Iskander of how the state of Qatar adopted the use of cordon sanitaire to map out
zones of political exclusion, I aim to explore the possibilities to treat the idiom of
“nation” to those of a “parasite”, in opposition to the generic tendency to portray
the relationship between the nation and immigrants the other way: the nation as
‘the host’ - the receiving body, and the immigrants as the ‘foreign bodies’ –
organisms that enter the host body and are ‘not supposed to be there’ (Hunter &
Taljanovic, 2003), like intruding pathogens to which the body is exposed ostensibly
without being aware.

The historically employed rhetoric, positioning the immigrant as a parasite drawing

nutrients – economic costs for their healthcare and maintenance - from the nation,
while presumably providing nothing to its survival, has been widely embraced during
recent times when state governments needed to attribute responsibility for
spreading the coronavirus across populations. However, this pattern of treating
immigrants as scapegoats has conditioned them to remain illegal and thus
obstructed their ability to act as political subjects (Inda, 2000: 46). In the meantime,
it has also reduced them to their economic function as providers of cheap labour
without acknowledging the crucial input towards building and maintaining the
nations they reside in. This signals the idea that the concept and the construct of ‘the
nation’, such as Qatar, is experiencing itself a kind of a chronic social malady. Such a
method of treating immigrants - especially those who are undocumented and
therefore exposed to the permanent risk of deportation leading them to become
fearful of accessing support services from police or civil courts (Willen, 2005: 66) -
suggests that the social illness experienced by the ‘nation’ lies somewhere else.
Were there no immigrants entering the country, the range of problems faced by the
nation states and their governing organs would remain. Another minority group of
people would be chosen to bear the burden for all the ills that nation presumably
experiences due to the presence of those bodies who do not ideologically fit within
the promoted vision of the national culture.

Imagining that a ‘nation’ sees, or wants to see itself as “founded on a bounded and
distinct community which mobilizes a shared sense of belonging and loyalty
predicated on a common language, cultural traditions, and beliefs” (Stolcke, 1995: 8
in Inda, 2000: 47), it is likely that any political construct defining itself as a ‘nation’
would never become cured from so often construed threats to its integrity posed by
anybody, be they called aliens, foreigners, strangers or immigrants. That is because
the problem here is the fact that territorially, nations have been throughout history
inhabited by a ranging variety of different cultures (Inda, 2000: 47).

Pandemic Bodies

Going back to the account from Qatar, the aspect of ‘territoriality’ - and the physical
organization of immigrants by separating the locations in which they work and reside
- is a powerful measure to establish a social condition that hinders interactions
amongst these immigrants and the rest of the members of the host society. This
includes their employers, their neighbours, healthcare professionals, migrant
activists, as well as other migrant groups. Spatial separation, framed as a public
health measure and thus appealing to the community members, is a useful means to
vilify the ‘foreign invader’. It gives strength to the narrative that immigrants have
turned into a never fully knownable ‘other’ and become blamed for issues they did
not originally create. This narrative convinces the rest of society that their own
identity is defined against ‘outsiders’, the pathogenic threat to the rest of the
community and the way living is understood and reassured against them. It also
makes sure that there is enough public acceptance gained through establishing such
a public discourse when it comes to splitting society into those who are entitled to
protection from disease, and those who are not. Implementing cordon sanitaire,
then, is a means that has less to do with the idea that immigrants are more likely to
spread the virus amongst society, but with something about the way these
immigrants are in the world that would result in such a political and cultural climate
where such a hostile practice becomes publicly justified (Iskander, 2020:
569).Furthermore, it is not only about exclusion and spatial separation of immigrants
from the rest of the society that explains why the construct of a nation such as
Qatar, at times when an overarching global health phenomenon is taking place, can
be equated to the behavioural mechanism of a ‘parasite’.

Once the nation establishes its territoriality through inventing borders and
boundaries, the geographic space becomes managed by organizing social structures
and relationships that bring to life the nation’s imagination of what it is. However,
rarely is the host nation one that has grown well-off enough to consider itself
prosperous or progressive. It is also rare to find any mention in the media - or any
other source of public narrative - that the immigrants are anything but a threat or, at
best, the costly victims of the variety of reasons that brought them to migrate. What
is not mentioned is that they are also consumers, taxpayers, but most importantly, a
low-cost work force that is not represented for a reason to remain invisible, but keep
on being exploited for nurturing that vision of a nation it wants itself to be seen by
(Inda, 2000: 51). That is especially true in the case of Qatar, a state whose economy
profits from the labour of immigrants and the amount of effort they are pouring into
the vision of the future from which they themselves are eventually excluded
(Iskander, 2020: 567).

According to Iskander, Qatar is “a country that has willed itself into existence” (2020:
569) through the means of distinguishing itself as a port for global culture. This
narrative does not establish clear boundaries around the imaginary Qatari national.
It leaves space for the imagination to manufacture the fabric of the population that
will be given the rights of citizenship and means to nurture their sense of belonging,
and those whose role will be instrumental, adapted towards developing the service
sector that would in turn tend to the needs of the former. It is not surprising, then,
that those roles which offer some of the most important contributions towards the
industries that form the basis for any functioning society, such as the construction or
service sectors, are often the working environments in which immigrants are placed.
Their minimal pay creates extra difficulty not only to survive financially as individuals,
but also to prosper in the future. It becomes clear then that the state is a parasite on
the immigrant, and not the reverse.

The immigrants are fed the myth that if they work hard enough they might acquire
some advantages of that in return. In the case of COVID-19 being spread across the
globe, in return the immigrants acquired nothing but cordon sanitaire – a factual
public health practice designed to isolate spaces related to the spread of infection.
The idea beyond this measure is not to slow down the spread within the wider
society, thus slowly killing the biological virility of the virus, but to cut off part of the
social body within a defined spatial entity that is perceived as infectious (Bashford
2004 in Iskander 563). According to Iskander, the government had confined the
workers within the zone to an extent where they were not granted any permission to
leave the zone, thus also excluding them from seeking medical care. In a situation
where a global health phenomenon takes place, the relationship exposes how the
nation state views immigrant workers as disposable units of labour that are neither
too hard to acquire, nor too problematic to replace and eventually eradicate. This is
at a time when they have become useless to that nation, or have been excluded
from further participation within that nation’s future.

Infertile Bodies

Apart from contagion, there is one more prominent anxiety that has always followed
the presence of immigrants within the host nation. Milena Marhesi (2012) calls this
‘replacement anxiety’. This phenomenon has been observed taking place within
social and cultural context of populations like the Italians, which have been
experiencing lower birth rates and assumed failure to reproduce themselves. The
demographic concerns that relate to immigration comes from another observation
that migrant women possess assumedly ‘excessive’ fertility rates and therefore,
according to national discourses, engender a direct risk to ‘replace’ Italians (2012:
171). Once again, we come to notice that the body of the immigrant within the
Italian context of reproduction is positioned as a site of social, political and moral
contestation, upon which the politics extrapolate the meanings of ‘rationality’ and
‘responsibility’.

It is worth mentioning that migrant women, the reproductive bodies of society, are
usually employed as domestic workers, taking on the tasks of caring for the Italian
young and old. Let’s look at this from another perspective: this structure of society in
which immigrants take the part of caring for the local population contributes
towards shaping a lifestyle where young Italians can either immerse themselves in
carefree hedonistic attitudes of having careers and planning holidays knowing that
there are workers to take care of their aging family members, or trust immigrant
women to take care of their children while they continue developing and fulfilling
their individual aspirations dictated by the trends of a globalized European mentality
(Marchesi, 2012: 172).

Since caring roles are still more often occupied by female immigrant workers (Andall,
2000 in Marchesi, 2012: 180), their reproduction then creates a scenario where
Italians face a difficulty having to find a solution of how to continue their preferred
lifestyles without such obstacles posed by immigrant reproduction.
This brings into question whether the fact that Italian, and more broadly – ethnic
European fertility rates have been declining, and the population of immigrants and
their descendants have been increasing, thus allowing social welfare systems to
spread the anxiety of replacement. On the other hand, is it not rather that the
governing bodies of European societies found a clause within the use of immigrant
laboring bodies as a subject that sustain the lifestyle on which the contemporary
European ideas of identity are being built? Going back to the ethnographic account
from Italy, if the issue had genuinely related with the fact that Italians are concerned
with the shrinking numbers of children brought to life onto their national soil, then
migrant women reproducing and growing the new generation of children in Italy
would not be condemned as an act of ‘irrational’ or ‘irresponsible’ behavior
(Marchesi, 2012: 174). Therefore, it becomes clear that the notions of who can and
should reproduce solely include the native Italians. They themselves having been
moralized into believing that their reproduction is that of a virtue that also balances
out the reproduction of immigrants, the people in contrast construed as a
problematic, if not dangerous, contribution to the whole nation, and not simply the
maintenance of the nation’s preferred lifestyle attitudes.

Conclusion

Immigration has been a field for public health regulations to exercise decision
making throughout the turn of centuries. The recent global health phenomenon of
the Covid-19 pandemic brought with it new urgencies for population government
practices that have already been struggling with the flows of undocumented
migrants that get easily positioned within the mechanisms of constructing nations
and maintaining lifestyles that take place within them. Although immigrants have
throughout centuries had to bear the brunt of precarity due to their purposely
volatile position within the host societies, it is the concept of a nation itself that is
built and made sense of within ideologies of inclusion and exclusion, with
immigrants being one of the main ones, usually becoming the scapegoat for all its
social and political ills and maladies. Before we redefine nation state structure and
building practices away from these forms that accept measurements of regulating
population within such means as cordon sanitaire, eugenics, racism and xenophobia,
we can claim that we live in a parasitical construct of life that imagines itself as the
provider of life, but only within a condition that someone else provides it with
vitality.
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