Care, control, and covid: Pandemic responses and the ‘migrant crisis’ in the Bihać region

In March 2020, measures against the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Bihać and the surrounding Una-Sana Canton in northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina, shifting the visible focus of care for the vulnerable from the ‘migrant crisis’ to concern for the wellbeing of the local population. Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter examines how different actors perceived and responded to the human needs brought on first by the large presence of Balkan Route ‘irregular’ migrants in the town and the nearby area bordering EU member Croatia and later by the pandemic. People traversing the region in hopes of clandestinely reaching the EU were already being judged and sorted by how much they were deserving of aid and from whom, with many questioning the provision of aid to migrants when members of ‘our poor’ also needed aid. When government officials attempted to restrict migrants to camps during pandemic lockdowns, their rhetoric changed from one of humanitarian care to framing migrants as a security risk in the name of care for the local population. This chapter shows how this shift made visible the existing aspects of control inherent in the system of ‘migration management’ carried out as part of the EU border regime.