The incredible speed with which medical and biological scientists developed vaccines and treatments for Covid-19 has not been matched by social scientists in our work to identify the impacts of the pandemic across the social and demographic characteristics of its victims. This is mostly due to the lack of data on the social impacts of Covid. Social scientists have been racing to measure the impact of Covid across age, sex, race, ethnicity, geography, and occupational status. We have only begun to measure its differential impact in terms of generation and immigration status. Yet social scientists have demonstrated that this pandemic has exacerbated inequalities and caused greater harm and suffering to those at the bottom of societal hierarchies, even while the global elite has grown more wealthy and more powerful as investment soared.
The children of immigrants are a disadvantaged group who have suffered disproportionate harm from the pandemic. In many rich countries, the children of immigrants are a large portion of those under age 18. In the United States for instance, one in four children in the United States is the child of an immigrant (18 million children).1 There are many characteristics of immigrant families that put them at risk for greater harm from the pandemic. Immigrants are often racial and ethnic minorities in predominantly white societies leaving them subject to racial discrimination and exclusion. Immigrants are concentrated in occupations and housing configurations that put them at greater risk of the disease and prevent them from working from home or otherwise avoiding infection. Immigrant families are more likely to be poor than natives and unauthorized status keeps many immigrant families from qualifying for or accessing government aid and health care. Immigrants are also often isolated from extended family and community support and this is exacerbated by language isolation. The children of immigrants are more likely than the children of native parents to suffer from schooling interruptions, partly because they have already experienced great disruption in schooling through the migration process, because they are already behind many of their peers because of the challenges of learning a new language and a new curriculum, and because school is not only a place for learning but an opportunity for immigrant children to integrate and create connections to other children and adults that eases their successful adaptation to a new society. Finally, throughout history, immigrants and minorities have been blamed for diseases.2 The fear of infection leads many to blame the stranger, leading to a rise in xenophobia and hate crimes, often intensified by politicians wishing to exploit fears and prejudices for political gains.
It is also important to note the resilience that immigrant families bring to the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. Immigrants have great strengths that can be marshalled to cope with the changes wrought by the pandemic. They are often ambitious and courageous people who have left home, either by choice or because of danger in the home country, and they have been forced to adapt to new circumstances, changing rules and requirements, and creative responses to new challenges. These are the human characteristics societies need to confront the sudden changes the pandemic engendered.
The challenges of the pandemic have not only demanded that individuals change and adapt, but they have also led to public policy innovations. Many of these innovations were short-lived but they demonstrate that there are better ways we can manage immigration and poverty policies.
Mortality and Morbidity in Immigrant Families
Although children and teens generally do not suffer from severe Covid and rarely die from it (Jha, 2021), they still experience many negative physical and mental health effects, most especially when their parents or grandparents fall ill or die. Immigrant parents have been at much higher risk of contracting Covid and of experiencing severe disease and death. Most countries do not have Covid-specific disease and death rates by nativity status. But the few that do point to much higher rates of illness for immigrants. Testing data are available by immigration status in a few countries and in those countries, immigrants are vastly overrepresented among those testing positive relative to their representation in the population. In the period from the beginning of the pandemic to May 2020, 32% of the people testing positive for the virus in Sweden were migrants; in Norway, 42% of those testing positive were immigrants. In the province of Ottawa in Canada, migrants composed 44% of those testing positive for Covid in the period of March 2020 to June 13, 2020. In Italy, immigrants were more likely than natives to be diagnosed late, hospitalized, and admitted to an ICU.3 Migrants from lower- and middle-income countries had worse outcomes when they did get sick in Sweden; “adjusting for sociodemographic characteristics, migrant men from the Middle East and north Africa had a 3-times higher mortality from COVID-19 than people born in Sweden”.4
In the United States data on Covid by nativity is mostly unavailable but data by race and ethnicity shows that Latinos and Blacks have higher rates of infection and death than whites: Compared to Whites, Hispanics have 1.3 times the case rate, 3.1 times the hospitalization rate, and 2.3 times the death rate.5 Analyses of excess deaths and resulting changes in life expectancy demonstrate the shocking racial and ethnic inequalities in the effects of the pandemic. Life expectancy fell overall in the United States in 2020 and 2021 by 1.7 years for females and 2.1 years for males. White males lost 1.5 years, but Hispanic males lost 4.5 years and Black males lost 3.6 years, a very stark and unprecedented reversal in American health trends.6
Nationwide, Covid rates by nativity are not available but one study examined county-level correlations between immigration status and Covid rates. They found U.S. counties with more immigrant residents had more Covid cases during the period 2019-May 28, 2020. Rates were particularly high in counties with high numbers of immigrants from Central America.7 In one of the few studies of mortality by nativity status at the individual level, researchers were able to compare deaths from Covid-19 among immigrants and natives in the state of Minnesota.8 Because immigrants tend to be younger than native born Americans it is important to control for age and when you do so immigrants had twice the mortality rate for Covid than natives. Foreign-born Latinos were particularly hard hit and young working-age men had the highest rates of mortality.8
Why would immigrants and racial ethnic minorities have higher rates of Covid? First, immigrants in rich countries are overrepresented in high-risk occupations. Immigrants are much more likely to work in the service industry, in jobs that cannot be conducted from home, and that put them in greater contact with other people and thus at risk for this airborne disease. Based on 2018 U.S. Census Bureau data for a report on Covid-19 impacts, 69% of all immigrants in the U.S. labor force and 74% of undocumented workers were reported to be essential workers, compared to 65% of the native-born labor force; 70% of refugees and 78% of Black refugees are essential workers,9 with non-U.S.-citizens making up 9% of the labor force but 22% of workers in the agricultural industry.10 In New York, the hardest hit U.S. city during the first wave of the pandemic, 50% of non-governmental frontline workers are migrants.11 Health care is another high risk industry where immigrants are 17% of the overall workforce but 29% of all physicians and 38% of all home health aides.12
While office workers were able to work from home, people working in health care, agriculture and meatpacking, and food services continued working. In Europe 74% of employees in the top wage quintile could work remotely, compared to only 3% in the bottom quintile.13 In the U.S., among high-income workers (income greater than $100,000) 45% were able to work from home compared to 18.4% of employees with income below $50,000.14
Self-employed immigrants and people working in the informal economy or in low-wage jobs are much less likely to have paid sick leave and are therefore more likely to work when they are sick, putting them at greater risk to contract the virus at work. In the United States immigrants are less likely to have health insurance than natives. While 93% of natives have health insurance, only 71% of those without citizenship are insured. Undocumented immigrants are specifically excluded from The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and often lack any health insurance or access to care except for emergency medical care at a hospital. Without health insurance immigrant workers did not seek testing for the virus and put off any treatment until they were very ill and required emergency care in a hospital, often in the ICU.
All of these factors mean that children in immigrant families were more likely to have their caregivers contract Covid. Immigrants disproportionately live in multigenerational households with elderly parents and grandparents,15 where workers who contract Covid could spread it to more vulnerable elderly relatives.
Higher mortality among working age and elderly family members means that immigrant children were more affected by the death of a caregiver than native-born children. From April 2020 through June 2021, globally 1,134,000 children lost a primary caregiver (parent or custodial grandparent) and another half million lost a co-resident grandparent. This has many negative consequences for children: “losing a primary caregiver increases the risk for children of mental health problems”, physical, emotional and sexual violence; and family economic hardship. These adverse experiences increase risks of suicide, infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, adolescent pregnancy, and chronic diseases”.16 In the United States, in the same period, 140,000 children lost a parent or grandparent caregiver. Hispanic and Black children were much more likely than white children to experience the loss of a primary caretaker (Hispanic and Black children account for 32% and 26% of all children losing their primary caregiver compared with 19% and 13% of the total population).17 Hispanic children were 2.4 times more likely to lose a caregiver than whites, black children were 1.8 times as likely. Asians were slightly more likely (1.1) times. The highest rates of loss were for Hispanic children living near the border.
These estimates are only for the first year of the pandemic and are likely conservative underestimates because they only include deaths officially from Covid. Some amount of Covid deaths are misattributed to other causes, and other deaths are indirectly caused by Covid – due to overwhelmed hospitals, exacerbation of underlying conditions or postponed medical care. Excess mortality that compares mortality during a Covid year to the average baseline mortality for a non-Covid year leads to much higher estimates of death rates. As of March 2022, the Center for Disease Control estimates over a million excess deaths due to Covid-19 in the U.S. since the pandemic began.
Poverty, Unemployment and Food Insecurity
Immigrant families in both the United States and Europe experienced high unemployment, rising poverty and increasing food insecurity. These trends were addressed with aggressive and relatively generous government aid, but this assistance was too often denied to undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. Unemployment figures are often not available for immigrants, but low-wage workers and Hispanics are found to have disproportionately lost jobs. From January to mid-April 2020 employment decreased by 14% for high earners, but by 37% for low earners.18 Census Bureau surveys found that “by early April of 2020 nearly six in ten nonelderly Hispanic adults had a household family member who experienced a decline in work hours or work-related income or lost their job because of the pandemic and nearly one in two had experienced material hardship in the preceding month”.19,20
The U.S. government deployed a series of relief provisions under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, & Economic Security (CARES) Act to ameliorate the financial hardship caused by the pandemic. Americans received direct relief payments, unemployment assistance was extended, and an Emergency Rental Assistance program was created to assist households with difficulties paying rent or utilities.21 However, the law was designed to exclude not only undocumented immigrants, but anyone, including citizen children, who lived with an undocumented person. Because undocumented immigrants can use an individual taxpayer identification number to file taxes, only people with a social security number on their tax returns were eligible for relief payments. Even if an adult had a social security number if they lived with someone who only had a taxpayer identification number they were denied the benefits. Immigrants also had to provide evidence of work authorization to qualify for the expanded unemployment benefits.19 While many undocumented people correctly perceived that they were ineligible, other immigrants who could have qualified for aid were either misinformed that they were ineligible or were too frightened of the government to receive the aid.
Many documented immigrants and even U.S. citizens did not seek out government aid, and even tried to return money to the government.22 In a particularly cruel turn of events the Trump administration announced an anti-immigrant public policy – the enforcement of a public charge rule, just as the pandemic was beginning, in February 2020. This administrative action sought to block immigrants from getting permanent residence if they received any government benefits including Medicaid or SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) (food aid). This rule was immediately challenged in court. At least nine lawsuits were filed challenging the rule, and while they were ongoing it was not put in place. In 2020 the Biden administration announced they were withdrawing the regulations. However, the Trump administration threat was widely talked about in immigrant communities and a great deal of confusion and fear surrounded the issue. Most people heard the words “public charge” but were unclear about what it would do to their or their families’ futures to be labeled as such. With a lack of specific information many respondents were wary of any contact with the government. For the undocumented this fear of government contact was exacerbated by a fear of any contact with any institution which might share information with ICE and lead to their capture and deportation. The twin burdens of poverty and fear of ICE led some people with Covid to avoid testing and to work while sick, thus endangering public health. Vaccine hesitancy was also widespread especially at the beginning of the program because of these same fears.
The lack of access to cash aid, the rise in unemployment, as well as the fear of accessing government aid because of the public charge rule, means that many immigrant families faced a lack of adequate food. Schools which usually provide breakfast and lunch for poor children were closed, and many churches that provided help to immigrant families were also closed in the spring of 2020. An Urban Institute survey conducted in December 2020 found that more than 41% of adults in poor immigrant families reported food insecurity in the previous year.19 43% of low-income immigrant adults reported that they were worried about having enough to eat in the next month. These families included citizen children and parents with documentation status, but the families did not access government services because of fear of the immigration authorities and the chilling effect of the public charge rule.
Scholars working at the intersection of the biological and social sciences have explored the effects of childhood adversity, including hunger, exposure to violence, natural disasters and other disruptive events on lifelong and even intergenerational health outcomes. The economist Hilary Hoynes and colleagues studied the rollout of food assistance in the U.S. in the period from 1961-1975 and found that children who had more food assistance in utero and in childhood had better adult health outcomes and higher incomes in adulthood.23 Tobi and colleagues examined DNA methylation among people who had been in utero during the Dutch famine of 1944 and found that there were epigenetic changes owing to the famine – that certain genes were turned off during that period and this affected their health 70 years later and also have the potential to affect the health of their children and grandchildren.24 These studies, and others with similar findings, should raise alarms about the everyday harms that poor children endure, but also suggest that the pandemic and the resulting privation may have long-lasting effects beyond those caused by the virus, including negative effects caused by government failure to provide for poor children and their parents.
Immigration Enforcement and Policies Towards the Undocumented
In both Europe and the U.S. individuals without documentation face heightened risks of Covid-19. In the United States there are an estimated 10.5 million undocumented immigrants. As of 2018, six million U.S. citizen children lived with an undocumented family member. Unaccompanied minors are children arriving in the U.S. without a parent. In 2021 a record high number, 122,000, of unaccompanied minors were taken into custody and held in shelters and immigration facilities. In Europe there are an estimated 1.9 to 3.8 million undocumented people, with the greatest numbers in Germany, the UK, Italy and France.25 In addition to the risks outlined above from concentration in the informal labor economy, working in high-risk occupations and lacking access to medical care and insurance, the undocumented and asylum seekers experience higher risk from Covid-19 through immigration enforcement.
Many families attempting to cross the border between Mexico and the U.S. are denied entry even if they try to claim asylum. The “Remain in Mexico” program begun by Trump and continued by Biden until August 2022 forced migrants to wait for an asylum hearing in overcrowded and unsafe tent cities at the border. Those who crossed unlawfully and were apprehended were held in ICE facilities where outbreaks of Covid were frequent. By December 2021 there were 31,000 cases of Covid in detention centers, and the infection rate in these centers was more than 3 times the overall U.S. infection rate.26 The facilities do now allow for social distancing and there are numerous charges of inadequate medical care for adults and children in detention.27 The children of the undocumented were already at risk from the omnipresent fear of deportation of a parent, and there are many established negative health outcomes from the heightened enforcement policies enacted in recent decades and amplified greatly by the Trump administration.28 The European Union also reported outbreaks of Covid among immigrants in migrant reception and detention centers.29
Both the United States and some countries in Western Europe reacted to the beginning of the pandemic in the spring of 2020 by releasing some individuals from detention in order to prevent transmission of the virus. In the U.S. the number of people in detention fell from a peak of 55,000 under the Trump administration before the pandemic hit to just over 14,000 in the spring of 2021. Alternatives to detention were offered to people seeking an asylum court date. These alternatives include electronic ankle monitors, calling in to ICE authorities each week and phone trackers. In Europe Bandariz and Fernandez-Bassa called the summer of 2020, the “short summer of abolitionism” because many countries released significant percentages of their immigrant detention populations.30 There were declines during this period of immigrants held by governments in Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden. Spain declared a moratorium on detention and closed all their facilities for the spring and summer of 2020. In the UK, widespread release policies reduced the number of immigrants in detention by 70%. Unfortunately, these declines were short-lived overall and the numbers of people held in detention has been growing again.
School Closing and Isolation
Covid has had a strong negative effect on mental health world-wide. Immigrant children and youth are at heightened risk relative to native children. Previous trauma, which is high among immigrant children, is a risk factor that makes the stress from the pandemic even more dangerous to mental health. In addition, immigrant children are often isolated from the wider community, many are linguistically isolated, and most do not have extended family available to help. When the pandemic began borders were closed around the world cutting off migrants from extended family and sometimes from absent parents.
The closing of schools around the world has hurt children everywhere but there is reason to think that children of immigrants have been set back a great deal. It is estimated that 95% of the world’s children lost access to in-person schooling at the start of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. This is the largest interruption of schooling in history.
School policy is very decentralized in the U.S. and whether schools opened or not was decided by governors of states and individual school districts within those states. From March to June of 2020 almost all schools were closed and provided only online instruction, if any instruction was provided. In the fall of 2020 approximately half of K-12 students attended fully remotely, 19% attended in a hybrid fashion, and 28% attended fully in person. Black, Latino and poor students were the least likely to attend in person.31 Scholars are only beginning to measure the effects of school closures on children and the stresses on the parents who had to suddenly provide support for instruction, often without support and in a language they did not speak.32 One study of students in the Netherlands points to large negative consequences for learning. While schools were only closed for eight weeks in the Netherlands, scholars were able to examine testing which took place before and after the lockdown on the same schedule as testing that took place three years earlier without school closures. Comparing the learning that occurred between tests three years previously to the learning that was measured during the Covid school closures researchers found that students lost the equivalent of one-fifth of a school year of learning, exactly the amount that the schools were closed. In other words, the average child was measured as learning nothing during the school closures. And students from less-educated homes showed 60% greater loss than those from more advantaged homes.33
While studies of learning loss are only now emerging, and none directly measure immigrant children’s learning loss, there are many reasons to expect that children in immigrant families will fare worse than nonimmigrant families. First, online learning, especially for primary school students, requires parental involvement to monitor and help students master the material. As noted above, more immigrant parents were in occupations that did not allow them to work from home. Immigrant parents often are not able to speak the language their children are being taught in. This severely limits the abilities of parents to help children learn the material. But even when language is not the issue, immigrant parents often do not know the school system, the material being taught or the kinds of help their children need. In a pre-pandemic study of pressures for immigrant parents to help their children succeed in school, Antony-Newman surveyed 40 studies of immigrant parent involvement in schools and concluded that both language facility and knowledge of how the schools worked put immigrant parents and children at a great disadvantage, concluding “Increased pressure on parents to be more responsible for the educational performance of their children may lead to further educational inequalities among diverse groups of learners”.34 This is not to say that immigrant parents do not help their children to succeed academically. They definitely play a role in immigrant children’s academic success by imparting values and discipline around learning and by helping students when they can.35 However it is still true that immigrant parents face much larger hurdles than native born parents in the world of online learning when parents are called on to teach as well as parent, many of whom worked in low-income jobs that they could not do at home.36
While all children suffered from school closures and mental health of children declined, with rising depression and isolation, the closure of schools also has no doubt effected the successful integration of the children of immigrants. Schools are places where children “Learn a New Land”.37 Teachers, peer friendships, athletic teams, playground activities, lunchroom chats are all places where immigrant children learn English, learn American culture and values and learn to “fit in” in their new country. The important work of integrating into America is also mirrored in what is lost for native-born children, who are also isolated from the immigrant kids who teach them new games, words, and ways of being in the world. The isolation of kids in online learning leaves little time or space and most importantly severs the connections that eases the two-way integration of natives and immigrants that is necessary for a healthy society and for children’s well-being.
Prejudice against Immigrants
Throughout history epidemics have led to scapegoating and xenophobia. Jews were blamed for the Plague in Western Europe during the Middle Ages.38 Immigrants have repeatedly been blamed for spreading disease and hate crimes go up when people are frightened. Covid-19 was no exception. Because the virus was first discovered and probably originated in China, anti-Asian sentiments and worry about Asian people spreading the virus began almost immediately after the virus was found to be circulating in the U.S. Irresponsible politicians such as Donald Trump blamed Chinese people for the virus calling it the “Chinese virus” or the “kung flu”. Hate crimes against Asian Americans rose quickly in the U.S. The Asian American Pacific Islander Equity Alliance, a nonprofit group based in California, monitored hate incidents between March 2020 and September 2021 and found 10,370 incidents across the U.S. including verbal harassment, refusal of service in businesses, online abuse, assaults and property damage. Perliger examined anti-Asian hate crimes from 1990 to 2021 and found an average of 8.1 crimes per year until 2020. During 2020 and 2021 there were 163 attacks or 81.5 per year; more than 11 times the previous average. These attacks were targeted at Asian Americans regardless of immigration status.39
Latino and Black immigrants were also blamed for spreading the virus. Republican Governor Abbot of Texas and DeSantis of Florida each blamed the high virus counts in their states on immigrants bringing the virus across the southern border. A survey by the Kaiser Foundation found that 55% of Republicans blamed immigrants and tourists for spreading the virus.
This toxic anti-immigrant environment is likely to persist especially when politicians deliberately lie to the people to cast blame on immigrants for an illness that is affecting the entire world. While studies have not yet studied schools and children’s interactions for evidence of this, there is no doubt that the children of immigrants will also face these anti-immigrant and racist beliefs and behaviors.
Policy Lessons
There are two policy responses to the pandemic that were not long-lasting but did show that we are capable of dealing with people in a more humane and generous way. The CARES Act and the child allowance that was a part of that and subsequent legislation cut child poverty in half in the U.S. This generous cash assistance is something progressives have been advocating for decades. It was put into practice relatively easily and in a way that got assistance to families with limited administrative burdens. It was cruel and punitive that mixed status families including citizen children with anyone who was unauthorized in the household were excluded from this aid. This did not have to be the case. Ireland, for instance, introduced unemployment assistance that was made available to all, including those without legal status.40 But for working poor immigrant families with legal status this assistance was very effective and evidence that the American government is more than capable of helping poor families. Unfortunately, the child allowance was not renewed and ended at the end of December 2021 and like clockwork child poverty is once again rising.
The other short-lived policy demonstration was the sharp reduction of immigrants held in detention facilities in both the U.S. and Europe.41 Most immigrants who are held by these governments have not committed any crimes other than immigrant violations. They are not a danger to the society and clearly alternatives to detention were found quickly once public health authorities deemed it necessary. It is very clear there was no need to be holding immigrant families and parents in detention and societies functioned very well once they were released. The fact that this was a brief interlude and detention numbers are rising again is deeply disappointing. The pandemic should have taught us that children can be united with their parents in the community and there is no need to separate immigrant families while they wait for asylum hearings or to keep children in detention.
One clear policy lesson from the last two years is that all children will need extra help catching up with the learning that was lost while in-person instruction was shut down. Immigrant children in particular will need help catching up to their peers, both in terms of language instruction and in terms of overall academic and cultural and social learning. Schools should not be merely going back to “normal” but investing in the most at-risk children.
It is also clear that health statistics and public health planning need to take immigrant origins into account. Plans for the pandemic did not generally include any specific planning for immigrant families, even though we now know they experienced higher infections and worse outcomes than other families. There should be universal access to health care, health insurance and public health messaging in the languages of immigrant communities. There should also be clear public messaging from political and social leaders that fights against the tendency to look for someone to blame for a pathogen and that focuses on immigrants and minorities.
Immigrant children and families bring great resilience and strength to receiving nations. They have experience coping with uncertainty, they are able to adapt to new situations and constraints. Immigrants have helped one another and through their essential work they kept our societies and economies functioning through the worst of the pandemic. Immigrant children should not have to face the illness and loss of caregivers, the loss of learning in school, the poverty and hunger that resulted because they were excluded from government aid, and the continuing discrimination and racism that has been targeted at their communities. Unfortunately, the past two years have brought many of these challenges and difficulties to their young lives. The least we can all do is try to heal the harm that has been done and create more opportunities for these young people to flourish and reach their potential.
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