Abstract
Using longitudinal qualitative data, we examine how undocumented immigrants in Florida navigated the first year of the COVID pandemic. Building on the concepts of compounded vulnerability and legal violence, we demonstrate how heightened exposure to COVID shaped immigrants’ well-being by virtue of being overrepresented among frontline workers, underserved by the healthcare industry, and excluded from government pandemic aid. We demonstrate how immigrants’ anxieties overlay onto existing vulnerabilities facing those without legal status; although undocumented immigrants were often at even greater risk for negative outcomes related to the pandemic, access to mitigation efforts was denied to them because of policies and laws that allow for—and normalize—the unequal treatment of noncitizens. Findings demonstrate that undocumented immigrants and their families experienced legal violence through the mechanisms of restricted government aid, for which they were ineligible, in addition to bureaucratic delays in immigration paperwork renewals that resulted in expiring work permits for some with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. These experiences further compounded their economic and social marginalization, rendering immigrants an expendable social group. We identify coping strategies that allowed immigrants to persevere in the face of uncertainty and distress and discuss how policies can diminish some of these vulnerabilities and improve their well-being.
Keywords
Introduction
With the pandemic in general, plus renewing my DACA, it just reminds you that you’re not seen as a full human or valid of existence in the eyes of the federal law and the country.
The COVID pandemic encompassed an extended period around the globe during which, in hopes to slow down its spread, governments imposed lockdowns to restrict residents’ mobility and businesses closed, many permanently. This was a challenging time for all, particularly in the beginning stages of the pandemic, given the high rates of illness and death, economic fallout, and educational and social implications of school closures. For immigrant, as well as racial and ethnic minority populations living in the United States, these challenges were compounded. Overrepresented among frontline workers, immigrants were more prone to suffer from COVID-related illness and death than the general population (Hasan Bhuiyan et al., 2021) and less likely to have health insurance allowing them to seek treatment (Kiester & Vasquez-Merino, 2021). They were among the groups most likely to lose employment during initial lockdowns (Borjas & Cassidy, 2020) and their living situations, which oftentimes consist of multi-generational households, increased the likelihood of others contracting the illness (Castañeda, 2023). Among undocumented populations, health risks and economic marginalization have been layered onto already-existing vulnerabilities related to legal status.
Yet the subjective experience of living through COVID’s initial year and how this interacted with immigrants’ legal status remains under-investigated. By subjective experience, we mean an exploration of how immigrants made sense of being undocumented and simultaneously confronting the risk of COVID, and the meaning-making they attached to their perceptions of risks alongside the limitations imposed by their legal status.
We expand on the concepts of compounded vulnerability (Patler & Gonzalez, 2021) and legal violence (Menjívar & Ábrego, 2012) to illustrate how government-created legal categories normalized and exacerbated undocumented immigrants’ vulnerability to the illness. We show how legal violence shaped their experiences of the pandemic, allowing the state to exclude them from mechanisms of aid available to those suffering negative medical, economic, and social ramifications. This increased harm in such a way that normalized unequal treatment and systematic exclusion of undocumented populations from everyday social life in the United States (Menjívar & Ábrego, 2012).The violence emerging from existing legal structures preclude certain populations from accessing care, which is compounded by everyday anxiety and fear and ongoing threats to programs that offer some relief, such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). We argue that, although undocumented immigrants were often at greater risk for negative outcomes related to the pandemic, their access to mitigation efforts was denied because of immigration laws that allow for—and normalize—the unequal treatment of noncitizens, rendering them expendable. We conclude by discussing how policies can improve immigrant well-being and reduce the effects of compounded vulnerability and legal violence in the event of a subsequent pandemic.
COVID and U.S. Immigrant Communities
Early in the pandemic, the U.S. media drove significant attention toward immigrants’ disproportionate representation among “essential workers” (Jawetz, 2020; Kinder, 2020). Portrayals of immigrant workers (including the undocumented) juxtaposed their contributions to society alongside the vulnerabilities they faced, including lack of access to benefits and protections extended to others (Page & Flores-Miller, 2021). Although there were some limited successes for immigrant communities in the United States, such as priority access to vaccines for farmworkers in California (Jordan, 2021), protections for this population remained limited and excluded millions. Even U.S. citizens who belonged to mixed-status families (i.e., whose members include people with different citizenship or immigration statuses) were excluded, further increasing the vulnerabilities for communities (Gelatt et al., 2021). Over 2 million U.S.-citizen or legal-immigrant children of undocumented parents were excluded from aid packages; 9.3 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States were ineligible under the two stimulus packages that were passed (Gelatt et al., 2021). 1 Initially, the CARES Act excluded some U.S. citizens, lawful permanent resident spouses, and children of undocumented immigrants (approximately 3 million people) by requiring all members of a household to have a social security number to qualify. These family members were later reclassified to be eligible for stimulus payments (Gelatt et al., 2021).
The ineligibility for pandemic relief was particularly harmful since undocumented immigrants were among those most likely to lose employment during initial lockdowns (Borjas & Cassidy, 2020). Undocumented populations took the hardest economic hit among all immigrants (Noe-Bustamante et al., 2021). During the pandemic’s first year, undocumented immigrants were among those most likely to suffer from COVID and die compared to the general population (Garcia et al., 2021; Hasan Bhuiyan et al., 2021; Horner et al. 2022). Several socioeconomic characteristics make them particularly vulnerable. Immigrants, particularly the undocumented, are more likely to work in frontline jobs that could not be performed remotely (e.g., construction, agriculture, housekeeping). They are also more likely to hold occupations that put them at greater risk for COVID exposure (e.g., retail, food service) and to rely on public transportation, further increasing exposure risk (Langellier, 2020; Svajlenka, 2020). They are also more likely to live in multi-generational households, which makes it harder for family members to quarantine, increasing the likelihood of contagion within households (Castañeda, 2023). Furthermore, they are less likely to have health insurance, which is known to facilitate treatment-seeking behaviors (Kiester & Vasquez-Merino, 2021). About 46% of undocumented immigrants are estimated to be uninsured, compared to 8% of U.S. citizens and 25% of lawfully present immigrants (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2022).
Although the pandemic itself created widespread trauma, its effects were especially stressful for populations with prior experiences of suffering and structural violence. The pandemic’s early months had a disproportionate negative effect on the everyday lives and health of communities of color, including immigrants (Fortuna et al., 2020). Evidence also points to negative effects on their social and emotional well-being, especially for the undocumented (Andrade, 2022; Enriquez et al., 2023), for whom trauma and high distress associated with the immigration process is common (Garcini et al., 2017). The stress for this population stem not only from risks, fears, and concerns linked to their own legal status, but also from those of their families and larger immigrant community (Aranda & Vaquera, 2015; Enriquez et al., 2023). Finally, the pandemic arrived at a time when immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, were already living under conditions of heightened stress, anxiety, and depression linked to the Trump administration’s actions, including anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies and the DACA rescission (Aranda et al., 2023; Wray-Lake et al., 2018).
Studies to date have begun to address the many vulnerabilities and stressors that undocumented populations faced during the pandemic’s first year; however, much remains unanswered regarding their subjective experiences (e.g., Ro et al., 2021) and how those intersect with precarious legal status. This is the focus of the present study.
Theoretical Frameworks
We build upon two strands of research within immigration studies. In the area of immigrant detention, Patler and Gonzalez (2021) proposed the concept of compounded vulnerability, defined as “the experience of having a confined parent or spouse while also being subject to the uncertainties of the immigration legal processes that can ultimately result in deportation and permanent family separation” (p. 889). Compounded vulnerability describes the synergistic interaction between legal status precarity and additional layers of state violence in the form of neglect or exclusion that aggravates already difficult experiences. We extend this concept to argue that, in the pandemic context, compounded vulnerability consists of being subject to the negative effects of disproportionate exposure to COVID (Kiester & Vasquez-Merino, 2021), overlaid with the vulnerability of being undocumented, which places limits on their ability to seek testing services and vaccines, and more broadly, healthcare, should they become ill (Galletly et al., 2021) due to lack of insurance or fear of being a public charge, which could affect regularization of status.
We also adopt the notion of legal violence, or the “harmful effects of the law that can potentially obstruct and derail immigrants’ paths of incorporation” (Menjívar & Ábrego, 2012, p. 1383). These effects are “often manifested in harmful ways for the livelihood of immigrants (ibid).” Menjívar and Ábrego (2012) argued that laws and their implementation and the practices they enable lead to the “accumulation of those damaging instances that are immediately painful but also potentially harmful of the long-term prospects of immigrants in U.S. society” (p. 1383). In the pandemic context, legal violence can take the form of excluding immigrants from resources and aid, or closures of U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services offices which created a backlog of processing services so that many immigrants fell out of status or lost their work permits. These government policies and practices further affected the well-being of immigrants during the pandemic.
We build upon these two concepts and argue that they are symbiotic: legal violence rests on the production of immigration categories that place immigrants in structural positions of compounded vulnerability, especially when one considers race and ethnicity, the poverty associated with being undocumented (Passel & Cohn, 2009), and other disadvantaged statuses (Zimmerman et al., 2022) that result in multiple axes of inequality. Conceptualizing compounded vulnerability as intertwined with legal violence, we seek to show how, as a result, immigrants are rendered expendable, particularly in situations such as pandemics that normalize this result through policies and practices that exclude and harm them. We argue that, although undocumented immigrants were often more at risk than anyone else for negative outcomes related to the pandemic, their access to mitigation efforts was denied due to their compounded vulnerability and legal violence practices, resulting in a condition in which they are considered expendable, and their unequal treatment normalized. We call this process normalized expendability.
Data and Methods
This study focuses on interviews with undocumented immigrants living in central Florida, the majority of whom were recipients of DACA. Initial interviews with 56 participants took place between 2017 and 2021, with follow-up interviews with half of the sample (n = 28) conducted between 2020 and 2021 in which we added questions about how COVID affected their well-being and how their legal status influenced their experiences related to the pandemic. The 28 follow-up interviews are the focus of the current study.
Eligibility for participation in the initial interviews was restricted to immigrants ages 18 to 32 years who arrived in the United States before age 16 and resided in central Florida. Several immigrant rights organizations supported recruitment efforts. Participants received a gift card as modest compensation. Initial interviews lasted about 2 to 3 hours and follow-up interviews 1 to 2 hours. Most interviews were conducted in English, with a few in Spanish. Interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Participants are identified here using pseudonyms.
We coded the transcripts using MAXQDA, a qualitative data analysis software. We engaged in several rounds of coding, beginning with open coding, in which themes were identified based on interview questions. Subsequently, theoretical coding was employed to connect concepts and establish relationships between categories related to COVID.
Participant Demographics
From the 28 participants, 18 identified as female and 10 identified as male (64.3% and 35.7%, respectively) and their ages ranged from 21 to 34 years, with an average age of 26 years. On average, participants had lived in the United States for 20 years, ranging from 15 to 29 years. Although most of the sample migrated from Mexico (20, 71.4%), they also hailed from seven other Latin American countries, including, Honduras (1), Bolivia, (1), Colombia (2), Peru (1), Argentina (1), Dominican Republic (1), and Costa Rica (1).
Findings
Two broad themes emerge from our data. First, many participants described experiences rooted in compounded vulnerability through the government-produced categories that result in greater COVID exposure and fewer mitigation measures among undocumented immigrants (i.e., legal violence). Participants were anxious about contracting the virus and bringing it home, mostly due to being unable to access healthcare, a situation that legal violence normalized. Additionally, they and their families were afraid to get tested or vaccinated because of concerns linked to legal status. We also show how immigrants experienced legal violence during the pandemic; in that, they did not qualify for federal aid and were at risk for losing DACA or work permits due to closed USCIS offices and delayed administrative processing times. Second, we identify several coping strategies that allowed them to weather the pandemic emotionally and financially.
The Lived Experience of Compounded Vulnerability Emerging from Legal Violence During the Pandemic
Compounded vulnerability and legal violence itself negatively affected participants’ well-being by exacerbating their vulnerability due to the government-created categories that resulted in their exclusion from government socioeconomic protection. This resulted in extra layers of worry and fear about themselves and their families contracting COVID and the associated consequences. Frontline workers, especially, expressed concern about bringing COVID home to their families, worry about the financial consequences of being jobless, fears about being unable to seek healthcare due to their status which often left them without insurance, concerns about closed USCIS offices that delayed DACA renewals and work permits, among other normalized ramifications of legal violence that rendered immigrants as expendable.
Marta, 21 years old, from Costa Rica, was a research assistant in college. Her legal status added an extra layer of anxiety to her fears about the pandemic: “I think more mental than anything, just having that extra level of worry, that extra step when trying to do anything having to do with pandemic.” That “extra level of worry” is seen in Tatiana, a 25-year-old nurse from Mexico, who was worried about working at a hospital because she feared contracting COVID and infecting her family. Her family also was worried that she would be the one to catch it: It was very hard. . .for everybody, not knowing what was happening, how you could get affected. Especially because I was still living at home at that time with my family, and I did work in the hospital. They were constantly asking me if I was taking care of patients like that, just like concerned for me having to go in. . .And me, concerned for them. . ..how was I going to make sure that my family were safe when I came back [home]?
Though many frontline workers, regardless of status, were worried about contracting COVID, undocumented workers are more likely to work in these positions thus experience greater exposure and have fewer mitigation measures. Their fears are also compounded by the inability to access health insurance and healthcare, a situation that legal violence has normalized. Moreover, young adult immigrants tend to still live with their parents, making household and intergenerational exposure more likely, leading to yet another layer of concern.
There was also worry about being unable to work and the subsequent lack of income in the household. Jairo, a 29-year-old graphic designer from Mexico, felt lucky that he already had a work-from-home job. However, his whole family contracted COVID, beginning with his father, who was out of work for 1 month, putting financial stress on the family: During the pandemic, for my family it’s been, up and down. . .. My mom doesn’t really work, she stays at home mostly, but my dad had to be off work for almost a month. At that point, we had some financial things that we ran into.
Another aspect of compounded vulnerability due to legal violence was worry about being unable to get testing, vaccines, or medical care if they contracted COVID. Marta, discussed above, stated these concerns: Especially when my parents had to go get vaccinated, documentation stuff, I know they were both a little worried about going and doing it. Glad they still went and did it, because we know a lot of family members were like, “No, we don’t have any ID or any documentation, we don’t want to risk anything.”
Indeed, there was misinformation circulating regarding identification requirements, residency criteria, and immigrants’ eligibility for vaccines. Vaccine hesitancy among immigrant populations during the pandemic is well-documented and includes fears associated with precarious legal status, lack of insurance, and difficulties accessing reliable information about vaccines, language barriers, and clashes between work and vaccine administration hours (Demeke et al., 2022). Emir, a 28-year-old construction worker from Mexico, discussed this in his interview: It puts a lot of people into unnecessary fear because you don’t want to go to get the vaccine or to get the test, just because of fear of no identification. Initially they were talking about not providing any assistance, especially here in Florida to undocumented [persons], later on I think they revised that.
Worries about vaccines extended to seeking medical care. Isa, a 29-year-old woman from Bolivia, had two jobs in the healthcare field. She explained her concerns, though noting that she felt lucky to have not contracted COVID to date: “If something were to happen to me, COVID-related, then it was a concern, will I be able to get medical help because of my status? That’s why I said, luckily, I haven’t gotten sick.” Indeed, nearly half of undocumented immigrants have no health insurance (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2022). Thus, worries about getting sick were intrinsically tied to their ability to seek care.
Norma, a 31-year-old, from Mexico, works in an organization that provides support for immigrants. She explained her fears about her family’s medical vulnerability and lack of insurance related to their undocumented status: ’We’ve been just really careful staying home as much as we can, only leave for essential stuff like grocery trips, because my dad’s diabetic, my mom has had thyroid cancer. . . You’re kind of in that pre-existing vulnerable category. Neither one of them have health insurance. So I’m like, “We ’can’t afford to have you hospitalized,” and that’s even if there’s beds, right? Because there’s so many areas that have no beds, and I’m always scared that if you have someone with health insurance and someone without, you have to save one, you’re probably going to save the one that you can charge the health insurance. . . to think that we have to think about these things, right? But that’s the reality that ’we’re in. . .
Norma felt that her parents’ undocumented status, which resulted in them being uninsured, would mean that if there were a scarcity of hospital beds, medical professionals would treat those with insurance over those without. The parents’ medical vulnerability combined with their status as uninsured, led to great fear that characterized her experience of compounded vulnerability and legal violence, which would render her parents as expendable. Her fear for her parents is a perfect example of normative expendability; the undeservingness of the undocumented population has become so societally ingrained that not treating her parents’ medical needs if they got sick is a realistic outcome from this hypothetical scenario.
Damian, who was 25 years old, from Mexico, also was a college student and worked multiple jobs before the pandemic. He summed up the experience of legal violence and the compounded vulnerability it produced below, in which he listed not just the concerns related to contracting the virus, but the fallout from being an undocumented immigrant: People have to worry about being undocumented, getting a disease, a virus, and paying if they do get it, not receiving a check because they’re undocumented, because of the $2 trillion stimulus package, so they’re not getting any of that, but they’re getting taxed on it. So, they have to plan about being left behind.
When Damian states, “they have to plan about being left behind,” he is acknowledging the expendability of the undocumented immigrant population. During the pandemic’s initial months, state and federal policies and practices directly affected immigrants’ livelihoods and well-being. First, policies limited who received federal and state aid and under what circumstances. Specifically, stimulus checks were sent only to taxpayers with Social Security numbers, and not those with Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITIN), which is the primary mechanism by which undocumented persons pay federal tax. 2 In addition, taxpayers holding a Social Security number but living in a mixed-status household were subject to additional insult, as the stimulus amount excluded undocumented family members in the calculation of household size.
Many talked about how the lack of the stimulus checks affected their families and overall household resources, including economic resources as well as manifestations in the social realm and in terms of overall health and well-being. As Katalina, a 21-year-old woman from Mexico who works in a nursing home, told us, “It was kind of hard, like, when my parents were laid off. My parents didn’t receive the stimulus checks and stuff like that, that was a little difficult.” Many families were unable to get the stimulus checks, even though they had filed federal taxes, because they had done so with an ITIN as undocumented persons. As Jairo explained, “During the stimulus checks, my parents didn’t qualify, because they’re still undocumented. So even though they pay the taxes, they use the ITIN number, so they weren’t able to qualify for it.” In mixed-status families, only citizens (i.e., those with a Social Security number) were eligible, which led to confusing situations. As Tatiana explained, With my parents being undocumented, we don’t receive stimulus checks. Even with my brother, because my brother is born here, he’s 17, but I don’t know if there’s a way for my family to receive his stimulus checks, because they are undocumented. So, they haven’t received anything throughout this whole year.
Indeed, undocumented parents with U.S. citizen children were not eligible to receive money that their U.S. citizen counterparts were entitled to. In this regard, legal violence and normalized expendability had spillover effects onto U.S. citizen children.
In another example, the Trump administration barred undocumented students from receiving moneys distributed under the CARES Act. Although reversed in 2021, this clearly and purposefully excluded students from the early rounds of emergency stimulus aid that was flowing into colleges.
Thalia, 25 years old, from Mexico, works for an organization that helps with DACA renewals: One of the big things that I was very not happy about is that the colleges receive the CARE Act, and none of us were able to get that money. And there’s students that had to go back home, that could no longer afford to live on campus.
Thalia sees this money as a lifeline to remaining in college. In its absence was significant financial worry, as Martha details: My biggest worry from all that was definitely the financial part of it. . .We couldn’t get any federal money, which was really terrible. Like, you can’t just ignore this population, whatever feelings you have about undocumented people, you can’t ignore that these people are living here, like my family, my mom. How are we supposed to live, and we have no money? She couldn’t get any stimulus money. So, what was extremely amazing about the scholarship was they actually gave us like stimulus money, they gave us about, like, $500.
Martha was part of a cohort of undocumented scholarship recipients at her university and describes here the “extremely amazing” moment when they discovered they would get some of the CARES Act funds, after all. Originally, the Trump administration barred undocumented students from receiving moneys distributed under the CARES Act, but this was reversed in 2021 under the Biden Administration. Although this applied to all undocumented students, and not just Martha’s cohort of scholarship recipients, it was through communications through the cohort that she learned about this change in the availability of funds to undocumented students.
In Florida, unemployment benefits typically are not provided to undocumented immigrants, however, under the CARES Act, those with DACA were eligible for federal unemployment insurance, pending certain qualifications. Nonetheless, participants faced barriers in being able to collect these benefits, most likely due to misinformation among staff regarding DACA recipients’ eligibility. By reclassifying some immigrants or family members into eligible categories, these examples highlight how laws variably exclude or include through the different categories of legal status.
Osmael, 24 years old, from Mexico, worked in welding and quality inspections. He told us that his family lost their apartment because of a job furlough, and were additionally told they could not collect unemployment: My son is turning four this year, my daughter just turned one. . ..With the pandemic, we lost our apartment, because I did get furloughed for like two months, and then it like went fast. I did [get unemployment benefits], but at first, they told me that I wasn’t able to because of my status, and then literally the last month they were like, “No, you can do it.” And I’m like, “Oh, snap.” So I went and done it. And so, I only benefited off of that for like a month, and then that’s it. So, because of that, I lost the apartment, we were living with my girlfriend’s aunt.
Compounded vulnerability and legal violence were apparent in this blend of public health crisis and lack of eligibility for relief programs due to undocumented status. This frustration at not qualifying for aid is evident in Emir’s experience: It’s been eye opening on how much people can be disregarded, because of our status. . .It’s kind of hard to put in words, status difference to us and to a lot of people basically impoverished people, there’s the whole nonpayment to individuals, because this affected everyone, the most affected are low-income status. And you see it, the relief provided wasn’t enough, only in places where you had people champion for these individuals like in California. . .But at the same time, they had no choice to continue working, like they couldn’t stay at home and safeguard themselves, because they need means to survive, so they have to continue working exposing themselves. It was eye opening.
Emir’s commentary sheds light on what he perceives as the government weighing which lives are worth protecting and which are disposable. Clearly, those without status are expendable, or as Emir states, “disregarded.”
Compounded vulnerability and legal violence also manifested themselves in the uncertainty and problems caused by USCIS office closures nationwide, including a reduction of staff that is only now being recovered that created a backlog of DACA renewals, work permits, and other processes. This directly affected the expediency with which immigrants could find economic footing during and in the aftermath of the pandemic. For some, these backlogs led to expiring work permits and even layoffs. The net effect of these examples of legal violence has been that immigrants had a harder time maintaining their own and their families’ livelihoods. Damian’s case highlights the lack of financial resources and impacts on livelihood and well-being because the USCIS office was closed.
It’s already harder for us to get a job. . .. So, just before [the pandemic], I was already struggling and broke, right? Now, I’m just struggling to stay alive and survive. . ..Some people might have to renew their paperwork and stuff like that. So, what happens when everything is closed, and the offices for USCIS to help renew your paperwork is closed, then how do you renew it? You can’t, so you’re pretty much left without any protection due to the virus.
Facing difficulties to renew their DACA because of office closures, yet no flexibility in terms of the state accommodating late renewals, is a form of legal violence in that it jeopardizes immigrants’ livelihoods, incorporation trajectories, and well-being. The consequences of not renewing DACA in a timely fashion are many. It led to delayed work permit issues, which in some cases did lead to people being laid off. Osmael describes how his sister was affected by the situation: “She’s also under DACA. . . so her fingerprints, the biometrics, it was delayed so much because of that, so she just recently lost her job due to it because they wanted that proof of work permit.”
Others found that their job circumstances were supportive and flexible, even when they faced a work permit expiring. As Jason, a 24-year-old man from Mexico, explained: My work permit expired and there is huge backlogs, and not just the first-time DACA recipients, but also for renewals. . ..Now I kind of have to re-worry, because I have no answer for the past few months, there’s no update, I haven’t heard anything. My comfort zone, my safety zone is more relying on my job and the support that I have in my job, because I know they’re supporting me. They’ll really retain my job, they’re helping me financially as well.
Even though administrative processing delays were causing him quite a bit of worry, Jason felt lucky that he had a supportive job environment that created a “comfort zone, safety zone” for him. Nonetheless, what these data show is how legal violence, which both creates and results from compounded vulnerability, reinforces how expendable immigrants are. The legal violence against them suggests that they are easily sacrificed, rather than a population to be protected, aided, or salvaged. They are caught up in a process of normalized expendability where policies exclude them, and they cope by relying on their families and communities to try to protect themselves and their families. We analyze how participants deployed strategies that allowed them to cope emotionally and financially with navigating the pandemic and its effects.
Coping Strategies in a Context of Exclusion
First, participants described developing a sense of well-being based on their understanding of relative deprivation—that is, they identified and articulated the ways in which they did not have it as bad as some others. As Julia, a 22-year-old college student from Mexico, notes, It’s been pretty rough; like a cycle of changes. For me, it’s my own well-being, mentally and physically. Only my mom, she’s the one that mostly supports the family, has helped us financially. So we weren’t backed up like most people that weren’t able to pay rent, and they had to be evicted and have to go to the food drives, so I’m very thankful for that.
Julia credits her mother’s help with being able to make it through this period in her life. She clearly counts herself as one of the lucky ones, in that she was not evicted nor had to seek food from a food drive.
Mireya, a 27-year-old originally from Mexico who worked as a patient care technician, explained that most of her family consisted of essential workers, and was grateful that they remained employed and supported one another as the pandemic went on: Thank God that we didn’t go through anything major like losing our jobs, which that’s the first thing we’re thinking about—“Oh my God what are we going to do, how we’re going to get by?” So, my mom kept working. . . my brother was an essential worker as well, my sister’s work closed down, she was only working like one, two [times a week], so it wasn’t really a major hit. . .and me, I was an essential worker as well, so we didn’t close at all. So that helped so much, because that was my biggest fear.
Although many essential workers feared being exposed to the virus, others, like Mireya, put this in perspective, just glad they were able to pay their bills. However, by not acknowledging the significant risks they were taking in terms of greater exposure to health risks, they inadvertently normalized the harms of legal violence—without the aid that others received to mitigate the pandemic’s effects, they were forced to work outside the home to make ends meet, and they often met this process of normalized expendability with language of acceptance. As Tatiana notes, “We’re very fortunate that we haven’t been affected extremely to a point where we’re like, we can’t make ends meet, we can’t pay rent.”
A second strategy participants employed was related to economic support, with individuals who had more flexible jobs feeling supported when DACA fell through, and families banding together to mitigate economic hardship through starting their own businesses, which also provided flexibility. Andrea, 33 years old, from Honduras, worked caring for an elderly woman as a home health aide. As others in our sample, she felt lucky that she did not lose her job when there were delays renewing her DACA. Her family also started a small business. This was an additional strategy for economic survival during the pandemic: As soon as we were able to get documentation and stuff, we started our own small business. That’s what my parents and my brother focused on. . .So, they run the business. . . thankfully, even with the pandemic. . .We do like shipping to Central America and Honduras. . . So, a lot of people were sending things during that time, but, you know, we, we’ve been okay, we’ve been healthy. . . we were able to get the vaccines.
Others had to work extra jobs to stay afloat financially during the pandemic, and/or rely on extended family members, as Martha described: That’s when I ended up getting my job at [business], because at that time, they were still open. So, I had to be like put on the financial responsibility, to be the one to make the money. . .and there was literally no help that we could get from anyone. I mean, the government. My uncle was really stressed during that time, too, because he knew he had to provide for his family and like, for our family as well. So, he helped us out tremendously, it was just crazy, like, we were so scared. . ..It felt like our biggest stress moment, we’re like, getting towards the end of the month, and then the payments were due, like, where’s this money gonna come from?
Martha acutely describes the fear of not being able to pay the bills; however, she does so in the context of recognizing the assistance from her uncle, who was key to helping her family survive economically. During this difficult time, Martha, as all the participants we interviewed, coped with the exclusion from assistance programs mostly through their families and other community relationships. Immigrant families banded together to weather the storm of the pandemic, seeing no other forms of aid, whether federal or from the state, coming through.
Discussion
Our study explored undocumented immigrants’ subjective experiences of navigating the COVID-19 pandemic’s first year and how they made sense of risk and vulnerability given their legal status. Building on and extending the concepts of compounded vulnerability (Patler & Gonzalez, 2021) and legal violence (Menjívar & Ábrego, 2012), we illustrate how immigrants undergo a process of normative expendability, whereby they are explicitly excluded from initiatives and aid to weather the pandemic, although their economic contributions are essential to the country, with harmful consequences for themselves and their families.
Carla’s words, at the outset of this article, capture how normalized expendability manifested in the lives of immigrants during the pandemic. As she said, immigrants were “not seen as a full human or valid of existence in the eyes of the federal law and the country.” During the pandemic, immigrant populations were explicitly excluded from access to programs intended to assist people in weathering the pandemic’s economic impacts. This exclusion added onto already existing vulnerabilities and heightened risks due to their social and economic standing in the United States. By classifying immigrants into in/eligible categories, laws can variably exclude or include populations through different categories of legal status. The violence of the law creates categories that preclude populations from accessing care and financial assistance. In our sample, this was compounded by everyday anxiety and fear among frontline workers as well as ongoing threats to programs like DACA. Although undocumented immigrants were generally at higher risk than others for negative outcomes during the pandemic, access to mitigation efforts was denied to them because laws and policies permit and normalize the unequal treatment of noncitizens. This legal violence has grave consequences for their well-being.
Our findings relate to two broad themes. First, participants described experiences of compounded vulnerability produced by the legal violence that results from being in a position of normalized expendability. Their precarious legal status, lack of health insurance, and heightened exposure to COVID resulted in worry about exposure to the virus or transmitting it to their (often multi-generational) families. They were often hesitant about going to places that provided COVID testing and vaccines. They also experienced legal violence through exclusion from federal financial relief, threats to DACA, and closures of federal USCIS offices, which affected processing times. Second, we identified coping strategies that allowed them to weather the pandemic emotionally and financially. Many described a sense of relative deprivation—they identified and articulated the ways in which they did not have it as bad as some other populations. However, in doing so, they appeared to minimize the expectation that they continue working as frontline workers, discounting the health risk, reinforcing the process of normalized expendability for undocumented immigrants. For economic support, there was increased family interdependence and informal networks of solidarity, as people banded together to mitigate economic hardship.
Our research contributes to scholarship on the role of legal status during a global pandemic. Though many have demonstrated that immigrants were particularly vulnerable to the pandemic’s physical and economic effects (Kiester & Vasquez-Merino, 2021; Galletly et al., 2021; Page & Flores-Miller, 2021), our work provides a snapshot of this time in immigrants’ own words. It illustrates the precise ways in which immigrants experienced these disproportionate impacts, and how they carved out strategies to cope with them.
The experience of vulnerability to COVID cannot be understood absent an understanding of how their precarious legal status and legal violence normalize ideas of immigrant expendability even among immigrant themselves. Normalized expendability has as much to do with not having proper documentation required by the government to access these services and programs, and hence, risking detainment if they applied, as it does with the fact that about half of undocumented immigrants are uninsured, which leads to lower rates of seeking care. Specifically, our study sheds light on yet another dimension of inequality among immigrants, namely undocumented status as a product of legal violence, when it comes to understanding the multifaceted implications of immigrants’ legal status on their physical well-being.
Several policy implications emerge from our findings. First, pandemic aid should not be contingent on legal status, particularly given the disproportionate representation of undocumented immigrants among frontline workers who were necessary for the economy to continue functioning. Lawmakers should sign into law comprehensive pandemic preparedness legislation that provides equal access to medical treatment, economic relief, and public health information for all individuals residing in the United States, regardless of immigration status (Human Rights Watch, 2020a). Such legislation has the potential of improving the well-being of immigrants more generally by reducing fear and stigma around accessing government benefits and services, encourage testing, treatment, and community health, which will ultimately contain outbreaks more effectively. Our research demonstrates that precarious legal status and restrictive government relief programs combined to create unnecessary distress and uncertainty for immigrant families with adverse impacts to well-being.
Second, the COVID pandemic shines a light on the importance of extending health insurance to populations currently excluded from public health planning and programming during a global pandemic. The recent extension of Medicaid to DACA recipients, for example, goes a long way toward expanding the social safety net to groups that do not have access to insurance through their employer. However, in mixed-status families, undocumented family members still lack coverage and easy access to care, which is especially notable given multi-generational living situations. The Coronavirus Immigrant Families Protection Act introduced in the 116th Congress during the pandemic provides a strong model for proactive policies legislators can take to protect all immigrant families during public health crises (Coronavirus Immigrant Families Protection Act, 2020). By prohibiting discrimination in access to pandemic relief programs, suspending certain immigration enforcement actions, expanding nutrition assistance eligibility via Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and requiring culturally and linguistically appropriate preparedness materials for public health outreach, the bill aims to ensure immigrants’ rights to health and economic security are protected during public health emergencies. Policymakers should also consider important pandemic time relief for vulnerable immigrant populations like those in immigrant detention centers and people living in poverty. Measures should include a suspension of deportations during global pandemics and a halt on transfers between ICE facilities (Human Rights Watch, 2020b). In addition, immigrant families experiencing poverty, especially during heightened economic marginalization in pandemics, should be able to access cash relief benefits with an ITIN and receive an extension of work authorizations (Coronavirus Immigrant Families Protection Act, 2020). Proposals like the Coronavirus Immigrant Families Protection came during the height of the pandemic exposing a lack of government preparedness. Rather than being reactive, the government should prioritize protections like these into law to protect the well-being of immigrant communities and the broader public the next time a major infectious disease outbreak occurs.
Last, given the extreme impacts of pandemic-related government office closures, there should be efforts at the state and local levels to mitigate the fallout of administrative processing delays by instituting emergency grace periods to prevent immigrants with temporary statuses from losing benefits and protections. By implementing these policy recommendations, we argue that not only immigrants and their families’ livelihoods and well-being will be better protected in the context of the next pandemic, but they will also benefit many others across the United States that rely on the contributions from this population in their communities.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, Award No. 1729396.
