It’s been good to see children skipping their way to school this spring. My Brooklyn neighborhood had been too quiet in the mornings. They brought life back into the streets.
One day a small boy took a tumble and landed right at my feet. Instinctively, I went to pick him up, but froze as I remembered: We are in a pandemic and need to keep our distance.
As well as the risks that could be faced by any child in the United States, immigrant children face extra challenges.
The incident shook me; even kids are on their own in this. COVID-19 is no great equalizer; rather, it hits the most vulnerable first and worst. One often overlooked population is immigrant children.
Today, more than forty million people living in the United States, or about 14 percent of the population, were born in other countries. More than a million people typically arrive each year from all over the world. The top five nations of origin are Mexico, China, India, the Philippines, and El Salvador. Some 9 percent of the people in the United States age twenty-one or younger are foreign-born.
The population of these immigrant children is diverse. There are vast differences in culture, legal status, socioeconomic backgrounds, and language. However, immigrant children have some things in common; generally speaking, they cannot vote, work, or spend, rendering them effectively powerless in our late-stage capitalist state. It is also rare to see these children represented in the media, leaving them largely without a voice.
COVID-19, we know, disproportionately affects Black and brown people, due to what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attributes to longstanding systemic health and social inequities. Significantly, COVID-19 also acts as a threat multiplier, meaning that those who are undocumented or poor or trapped in a violent home will likely have a worse experience.
The harm of COVID-19 to children goes beyond just contracting the virus and getting sick. As pediatrician Rachel Pearson wrote last year in The New Yorker, “I should also worry about children losing their parents or grandparents, missing meals, and falling behind in school. I should worry about kids whose learning disabilities will go undiagnosed without school screenings, LGBTQ+ teens trapped in unsafe homes, and children traumatized from witnessing domestic violence.”
As well as the risks that could be faced by any child in the United States, immigrant children face extra challenges. Deportations of parents have continued unabated throughout the pandemic. Immigrant children living within the United States, from families authorized to be here but not naturalized, face an unfair hurdle in getting government assistance.
And while the Biden Administration has said it will not support the public charge legislation put forth by the Trump Administration, meant to deny citizenship to immigrants who may at some point require public assistance, immigrants are still less likely to access the social safety nets provided during times of crisis.
A study by EconoFact found that eligible immigrants participate in programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) at a lesser rate than other eligible populations, often out of fear that doing so will jeopardize their ability to remain in the United States.
Homeschooling during a shutdown has proven difficult for everyone, but immigrant children stand to lose the most. The Migration Policy Institute put it bluntly: “The COVID-19 pandemic has affected nearly every aspect of education, and it is expected that English Learners . . . will suffer disproportionate impacts.”
Five million schoolchildren are classified as English-language learners, meaning they lack fluency, and even more come from homes where their parents or guardians speak a different language. Lessons don’t just get lost in translation, there is a real danger they will fail to reach the children in the first place.
Since the crisis is just one year old, it is difficult to know the long-term impact on the mental health of immigrant children. Increased levels of stress and poverty, and of course the grief that comes to those children unfortunate enough to lose a loved one, could all take a toll.
And, with recent spikes in racist attacks on Asian people and Asian Americans, many immigrant children are at risk, physically and psychologically. As we work to recover from the fallout of this pandemic, we must keep immigrant children front and center. When social distance is no longer necessary, the work to eliminate every other distance must continue.