ABSTRACT
The discourse on human mobility is inextricably linked with the nation-state’s monopoly to regulate and control it. Irrespective of whether the migration is forced or voluntary, mobility is the primary facilitating factor that enables the migration of individuals. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought about a new politics of human mobility that has adversely impacted the dynamics of migration across the globe. As mobility and physical proximity are the key drivers in the spread of the corona virus and thereby the pandemic itself, various governments throughout the globe have instituted restrictive policies such as complete or partial lockdowns, border closures, travel bans, etc. The governance of the state during the pandemic was thus hyphenated with the politics of mobility/immobility that reasserts the dichotomies of inclusion and exclusion especially in the realm of protection. It creates a hierarchy of inequality where migrants and refugees transmute to potentially disposable bodies while the citizen becomes the indispensable entity of body-politic who is worth the protection that the state has to offer. In the given context, this chapter tries to examine how the pandemic has conjured a new politics of mobility/immobility that impacts migrants and refugees adversely.
