Illuminating the “Unspoken Others” - Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic amongst undocumented migrants in the Global South

There is a double blindness when it comes to undocumented migrants in the Global South: the effect for undocumented migrants has received little attention in media and academia, even less so for experiences from and in the Global South. In fact, long before COVID-19, migration and mobility were already intrinsically embedded into a hierarchical globalized regime of asymmetric power, that largely determines who can move and under what conditions (e.g. Kotef 2015; see also Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2020). This global regime has established a population of “unspoken Others” whose mobility is highly regulated and hindered (Kotef 2012). This pre-existing restriction on movement for many people, crossed with a global health crisis, has potentially deadly consequences: a recent OECD study shows that migrants have a two-to-three times higher risk in getting COVID-19 (2020a). This project wants to highlight these inequalities and look at how undocumented migrants in the Global South have responded to the pandemic, in particular in relation to increased controls and the ways they have remained (im)mobile. The project covers four countries as case studies of undocumented migration, namely Mexico, Nepal, Qatar and Zimbabwe. All are in the Global South (Mexico, Nepal, Zimbabwe) or are major destinations of Global South migrant workers (Qatar).