Location,Location,Location! How Place Differently Activated Legal Status and Affected Pandemic Impacts on Immigrant Families in NYC/UpstateNY

• In Event: 20862 - Section on International Migration Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 9: Pandemic and Post-Pandemic Impacts on Migration

Abstract

Why would immigrants, and especially undocumented immigrants, in New York City experience dramatically different and worse harms and outcomes in the pandemic than their counterparts in upstate New York (within two hours of the Canadian border)? For example, respondents in a large (over 5000 person) July 2020 survey of mostly undocumented immigrants in New York City reported dramatic losses in income (from $503 per week prepandemic, to $146 per week in July 2020); 10% had already lost a family member to Covid. Our NYC study participants reported their incomes had only recovered in 2022 to half their prepandemic levels (about $240 per week), they still then experienced widespread food and housing insecurity, and many had debilitating long Covid symptoms. Conversely, documented and undocumented immigrant participants in a 2023-2024 study in upstate New York reported nearly no income loss (even some income gain) – and little or no food or housing insecurity. Fewer got Covid, and nearly none had long Covid. Finally, why and how did New York State’s $2.1 billion Excluded Workers Fund – which sought to soften the harms of the pandemic to undocumented workers – only mainly help those in our New York City study, and why did many eligible workers in need not apply for it?
We empirically and theoretically explain these divergent outcomes and contribute to research on how the pandemic affected immigrants, how legal status affects immigrant wellbeing, and how place interacts with legal status to amplify or minimize impacts on undocumented immigrants and their families. Specifically, we treat the interaction of legal status, place, and the pandemic as a strategic research site (Merton 1987) because it enables us not just to show different pandemic impacts among undocumented immigrants in NYC and upstate NY, but to empirically trace the processes and mechanisms by which those impacts happened.

Authors

• Robert Courtney Smith, Baruch College, CUNY

• Andrés Sebastián Besserer Rayas, CUNY-Graduate Center