**1. Introduction**

The COVID-19 pandemic caused grea<sup>t</sup> loss of human life as well as social and economic disruption in Europe and the World. Strict measures have been imposed internationally in order to avoid the spread of the disease and protect public health. The most widespread emergency measures worldwide have been the restrictions on movement (quarantine and lockdown projects), promoting 'social distancing', intense testing, personal hygiene as well as hygiene protection measures and, eventually, a vast vaccination program implemented from 27 December 2020 onwards globally (Escritt 2020).

Marginalized migrant populations living in extremely precarious conditions were prone to be disproportionately affected by the spread of the disease compared to those living in well-arranged environments and being in a position to afford necessary precautions for their health protection. In this regard, our present study examines the Greek public policies implemented to protect asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants against the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the extent to which they have reached their scope in an efficient and timely manner. The basic hypothesis examined is that said policies helped the amalgamation of penal, administrative and migration law processes facilitating crimmigration rather than alleviate the migration-refugee experience. Our paper supports the idea that public health processes in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic are contributing to

**Citation:** Tsiganou, Joanna, Anastasia Chalkia, and Martha Lempesi. 2021. COVID-19 Crisis as the New-State-of-the-Art in the Crimmigration Milieu. *Social Sciences* 10: 457. https://doi.org/10.3390/ socsci10120457

Academic Editor: Robert Koulish

Received: 10 August 2021 Accepted: 12 November 2021 Published: 29 November 2021

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the 'dangerization' (Nikolopoulos 2012) of mixed migration populations and have helped the intensification of official controls against them. Given the high visibility of the deviant behavior of migrant perpetrators (Tsiganou et al. 2010), the immigration controls are (re)structured also by means of public health protection processes. Thus, a new field of a manifested and disguised crimmigration emerges.

The literature review reveals that the concept of crimmigration is used to connote the dynamic interplay between the different fields of penal, administrative and migration laws. In some cases, the concept is used to refer to the criminalization of immigration law, or "crimmigration law", (Stumpf 2006) in order to denote the convergence of immigration and criminal law (Stumpf 2006; Guia et al. 2011; Aas and Bosworth 2013; Salamon 2017). In other cases, the concept of crimmigration has been connected broadly with issues such as criminalizatisation (Salamon 2020), border control (Broeders and Hampshire 2013), securitization (Gerard and Pickering 2013), detention (Bourdeau 2019), deportation (Menjivar et al. 2018), exclusion (Rottem 2021) and sovereign bias (Koulish 2016). There are also theoretical and research approaches which witness the infiltration of the crimmigration process within the public health field (Websdale 2020) or have shown "*how COVID-19 has forced new understandings on crimmigration law and politics*" (Koulish 2021). However, public health managemen<sup>t</sup> in times of pandemics or hygiene crises in conjunction with crimmigration practices needs to be further explored in order to comprehend the dynamic interplay between public health controls and crimmigration processes.

Our study is based on documentary evidence provided through the examination of official documents and news media texts. As already stated, one of our main concerns was to examine whether and to what extent official health policies, even in the emergency occurrence of a pandemic, constitute an additive part of crimmigration. In our undertaking, we have tried to decipher aspects of crimmigration clearly stated, disguised or even hidden throughout our research material, which has been collected through archival research of official documents such as governmental papers, laws and regulations texts, decrees and ministerial decisions, as well as media commentaries and news texts. The research material covers the period from 1 January 2020 to 30 May 2021 when the restrictive measures combating the coronavirus pandemic had been temporarily waved or relaxed.

Our evidence also suggests the reinforcement of the crimmigrant identity through the official managemen<sup>t</sup> of the health field. As it will be shown, the Greek case bears witness that migrant and refugee populations remain, to a large extent, abandoned without being prioritized in the measures provided to combat the coronavirus pandemic (i.e., hygiene precautions, testing and vaccination). Based on our research material we also argue that such a confrontation has accelerated new forms of mixed migration flows managemen<sup>t</sup> and control, given the asylum seekers' and undocumented migrants' already existing exclusion from institutional health care. This way, their already established identity as "criminalized subjects"—who do not 'deserve' prioritization in public health care—is reinforced by the state managemen<sup>t</sup> of the present pandemic inside open/closed 'facilities'.

In the crimmigration context, third-country nationals, as non-citizens, are seen as being always to be blamed and criminalized, their dangerized identity based on the mere fact of their migrant and/or refugee status and the stigma attached to it. Moreover, migrants' and refugees' presence in the 'host' country is perceived as a severe social threat and even as a menace to a society remaining intact before their advent (Salamon 2017). Under the conditions of the present pandemic and the hygiene crisis it has created, migrants and refugees, as non-citizens, are classified not only as (potential) criminals but also as a threat to public health. This way, new negative characteristics are added to their already stigmatized identity so that these populations of non-citizens are confronted and managed not only by means of walls, borders, rules, 'public condemnation' (Stumpf 2006) and 'social closures' (Tsiganou et al. 2010) but also by means of exclusion from assets destined to protect primarily the host country's nationals. Migrants and refugees, as non-citizens, remain excluded once more from access to basic goods—either public or common. As the Greek case testifies, hygiene crises may create new grounds for deepening already existing exclusionary processes.

As the Greek case testifies, under the coronavirus pandemic, migrants and refugees, as non-citizens, remained systematically absent from any prioritization campaign and urgen<sup>t</sup> policy measures to combat the crisis. They have remained, of course, 'quarantined' and systematically untested at their dystopian camps in extreme 'caging' measures for a longer period compared to the native population. It is to be noted that in the official rhetoric, they were represented as being disproportionally not affected by the COVID-19 virus, a justification most handy for the absence of any relevant public care policy. As a result, migrants and refugees, as non-citizens, remained unvaccinated almost half a year after the Greek vaccination plan had been implemented.

Our study concludes by providing a discussion on health discrimination against migrants and refugees, as non-citizens, in a way that creates health and, therefore, societal borders which unavoidably lead to a regime of health 'apartheid' via a vaccination institutional racism that adds new dynamic connotations to 'crimmigrated' identities and the crimmigration conceptualization overall.
