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We hope that, as part of the ongoing need to investigate these issues, the project offers researchers and advocates a starting point to work for change now and before the next pandemic erupts and costs more lives.ĬOVID-19 quickly emerged as the perfect rationale for the Trump administration to crack down on immigration, and carry out a restrictionist agenda that had been long in the making. The Immigrants in COVID America project clearly shows that the pandemic led to higher mortality rates, fear of violence, economic pain, and health-care inequities among these communities. In this essay, we share some of our findings on immigration policy, anti-Asian racism, and the stories of how the pandemic has impacted Black immigrant and refugee communities. Through partnerships with the Sahan Journal, a nonprofit digital newsroom dedicated to providing news reporting for and about immigrants and refugees in Minnesota, and journalist and University of Minnesota PhD student Ibrahim Hirsi, the IHRC is also creating digital stories documenting the experiences of immigrants and refugees during the pandemic. Our goal was to create a historical record of the crisis and to provide a publicly accessible resource for emerging research, teaching and learning, creative work, and anti-racist advocacy that leads to equitable and social justice–centered change.
This curated digital collection of news reports, data, perspectives, and other resources documents the health, economic, and social impact of COVID-19 on immigrants and refugees in the United States. This is why, in the spring of 2020, two of us launched the Immigrants in COVID America project through the Immigration History Research Center (IHRC), which Erika directs, with additional support from the Social Science Research Council. What, then, has happened to immigrants in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic? The answer is the same discrimination, disenfranchisement, violence, and terror as before, only intensified. It has yet to address the Title 42 public-health order President Trump put in place at the start of the pandemic, an order that, by January 2021, had resulted in turning away almost 400,000 migrants, including many asylum seekers. As of June 2021, the Biden administration has ended the controversial Remain in Mexico Program, established a long-awaited task force to reunite separated families, and resumed refugee admissions.
While the Biden administration has reversed some of Trump’s executive actions, many of them remain in place. It soon became clear that the administration was using the pandemic to advance an immigration agenda that predated the onset of the pandemic. Initially put in place as temporary measures, many were extended indefinitely. President Trump, meanwhile, was halting immigration, insisting that the executive orders he issued were necessary to protect the American public from the pandemic. In New York City alone, anti-Asian hate crimes rose by 223 percent. From March 2020 to the end of March 2021, over 6,600 reports of racist incidents were reported in all 50 states and in the District of Columbia. Since January 2020, Asian Americans have been harassed, yelled at, attacked, and shunned in stores and restaurants on city streets, buses, and subways and in their own neighborhoods. But they were not alone in facing danger. With his fears about being exposed to the virus as a health-care worker, Oballa expressed the concerns of many Black immigrants and other immigrants working in essential industries. “Every single day I went to work, I prayed to God.” 1 He recalled, in an interview, how he felt during the initial months of the pandemic. As a health-unit coordinator at Mayo Clinic in Austin, Minnesota, Oballa was even concerned that he might contract the virus at his workplace. In the first few months of the pandemic, Oballa Oballa heard of many people in Minnesota’s African-immigrant community who had tested positive for COVID-19. They were likelier than white Americans to fall into groups at higher risk of serious COVID-19 infection and mortality-groups such as “essential” workers, incarcerated populations, and people with underlying chronic health conditions. Even before the pandemic, many members of these groups were already disproportionately impacted by generational poverty and income inequality had unequal or no access to health care, health insurance, and paid sick leave and had been scapegoated during earlier public-health crises. This has been especially true for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, Pacific Islander, and immigrant and refugee communities. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, it has been startlingly clear that the virus has not affected all Americans equally.
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