Setting a Death Trap: International Political Economy, COVID-19 Response and the Plight of Central American Migrants

This chapter begins by describing international political economy as a broad theoretical approach in human geography and the types of issues it sheds light on. In particular, we focus on its deployment in our own research fields of critical development and health geography. Turning to COVID-19, we describe how the pandemic has brought into much sharper focus the inequitable and discriminatory foundations of these systems. In particular, we outline three spaces of contagion foisted upon Central American asylum seekers and survival migrants in the time of COVID-19. These contagion spaces include detention centres constructed to ‘contain’ migrant mobility, modes of mass transportation used to funnel migrants ‘home’ following mass deportations and the ‘physical distancing’ and self-quarantining lockdowns facing these migrants as they are returned to their respective places of origin. Together, these spaces reveal the extent to which wider political economic forces have put survival migrants at an elevated and cumulative risk of catastrophe—what we regard as a death trap of discriminatory systems intended to serve dominant political and economic interests. We conclude by discussing a future political economy research agenda on COVID-19 and similar situations that might follow it, in which geographers are well positioned to offer grounded yet scalar accounts of structural violence and inequality.