Since the outbreak of COVID-19, there has been increased attention on the ostensibly ‘new’ discriminatory quarantine border policies and practices, which have been enforced upon forcibly displaced people living in refugee camps and detention centres in inhumane, appalling and degrading conditions in Greece. COVID-19-related quarantine border practices and health inspections have been enforced within a crisis framework – that is, as something new and exceptional which justifies and legitimizes extreme border policies and practices in the name of the common good. Despite the mainstream crisis discourses around COVID-19, militarized border practices, mandatory health inspections and discriminatory treatment of border crossers on the grounds of the protection of public health are not new. Historically, quarantines and health inspections have been an integral part of border controls and surveillance, management and screening, sorting and excluding the unwanted human mobility (Iliadou, 2020). Therefore, they are inextricably part of migration governance, and as such they must be seen as a manifestation of border violence.

Historical traces of quarantine border practices can be traced in the multiple border monuments, like Ellis Island in the US, which between 1890 and 1954 operated as an immigration and health inspection site from where border crossers with contagious diseases were systematically banned as a threat to public health (Yew, 1980). The Greek state has been enforcing similar discriminatory health inspections and quarantine practices, border controls and expulsions of border crossers. Ironically, though, between 1892 and 1924, more than half a million Greeks went through Ellis Island inspection processes – as migrants seeking a better life – and many of them were banned from the US. Also ironically, Greek migrants experienced racism and hostility given that they were not accepted at first by American society. Some of the racist and dehumanizing terms used were ‘greaseballs’ and ‘dirty Greeks’, and they were also subjected to racial laws applicable to African American people, as Greeks were not considered ‘white’ (Chrysopoulos, 2018).

The operationalization of islands as prisons and sites of confinement in the name of public order and social control also has a very long history.