(1) As states grapple with responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become increasingly clear that the global society follows an existing script of the outbreak narrative which facilitates more surveillance and regulatory mechanisms underpinned by classist/racist tropes.

(2) While state centralization is inevitable during pandemics due to our limited political imagination, stringent border technologies to control human mobility and revival of border fetishism suggests the naivety in making sense of pandemics socially.

(3) To presume that increased border control safeguards national populations is a modernist fantasy based on medicalized nativism, a term coined by historian Alan Kraut. It presumes that stigma toward immigrant groups is justified by their association with communicable disease.

(4) However, such a nativism draws from classism and racism. For example, presuming that the virus itself is African or Asian, because the first knowledge of it comes from those locations. It treats virus as immigrant and immigrant as virus, as many cultural analysts can attest.

(5) Similarly, like in India, migrant labourers are treated as the primary catalysts of spreading the virus, alongside many Islamophobic undertones that fascism in India deploys. This is done by forgetting the obvious fact of who travels abroad more often, who carries it, etc.

(6) Yet, the response of medicalized nativism, even against white, rich countries, by strengthening crimmigration systems is something to be skeptical about since they often become conditions for future regulatory technologies that perpetuate suffering for migrants and refugees.

(7) While in some cases being necessary evil, it is best to not endorse such technologies that increase the precarity of the migrant condition worldwide. It is essential that our responses to pandemics based on care and compassion, and reinvent scripts of action during outbreaks.