[ #PODCAST] I joined @eolander to talk about the context behind the crisis that's unfolding among Africans in #Guangzhou in relation to #covid19
Join us for a timely and important #sinoAfrica discussion: https://bit.ly/2V0uR3a 

Perhaps the most important point (not made in the podcast) is that #covid19 will change the world in such profound ways that even regimes of migration/mobility will be severely impacted. Is this the end of ‘migration’? Maybe as we understood it for decades. THREAD

In the context of ‘migration’ to China, the PRC has long been an ‘outlier’ in terms of international migrations. While it has clearly become a destination, its legal framework of exit-entry (rather than an immigration policy) have made migrant abode (legal/illegal) a torny issue.

Indeed, I believe that after the #coronavirus crisis, foreigners in China will face a new regime of mobility. While in the past, foreign migrantion in China was driven by the logics trade (commercial migrants) and (for those with illegal status) a cat-mouse, circumvention, game.

In the near future, the new regime of foreign mobility will be a postpandemics, that we could call ‘emergency mobilities’. Fear and anxiety will be the logics of this regime of mobility, compounded by surveillance through technology.

It’ll be almost impossible to be an ‘undocumented’, ‘sans papiers’, individual in the contexts of this ‘emergency mobilities’. The typical invisibility and untrackability of the undocumented will be the highest risk in a technologically surveilled society.

This may well be the end of traditional forms of illegal abode, at least in China. The risk of letting unrecognised individuals roaming around brings with it a potential new epidemic. #crazy.

This is #covid19 mobilities. I bet someone already sent a book proposal to Routledge about this.

I'm gonna make this thread into an article right now.