Photography by Wesley Law
As the executive director of the St. Louis Inter-Faith Committee on Latin America, Sara John has seen plenty of fretful parents and cash-strapped laborers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The committee is the fiscal sponsor for a coalition of about 40 organizations called the Immigrant Service Providers Network. Together, they’ve been working to address language barriers and access to COVID-19 resources and information.
How has St. Louis’ immigrant community been affected by the economic downturn? Immigrants and mixed-status families are disproportionately impacted in the same way as communities of color and communities living in poverty: Preexisting injustices have been exacerbated by the pandemic. Immigrants of mixed-status families were excluded from stimulus support, so in many households, families are not eligible for unemployment benefits and certainly not eligible for federal stimulus dollars. Even in what we’d call a mixed-status family—where maybe one parent is a U.S. citizen and one parent is not—those families are excluded and not eligible to receive stimulus funds. That means we are seeing families where both parents lost jobs or are unemployed because of the pandemic, then have zero support for their children and their own health and wellness.
What is the long-term impact on those families? One of the service providers reported that within the first couple of weeks [of the pandemic’s job losses], nearly a quarter of their families had zero income. For families who often live paycheck to paycheck or are pretty close to that, there aren’t reserves of savings or backup plans for no income. Figuring out how long it is going to take to come out of that, to rebuild, to figure out what the cost of education is going to be, that’s going to shape the ability for parents to work in the future. There’s a web—a firework, almost—of impact that we still haven’t seen. Not everyone is going back to work. We’re talking a lot about “everything is opening up,” but that doesn’t mean that everyone has a job that is going to welcome them back.
What is your organization doing to address these gaps? Working closely with the ISPN, we created the Immigrant Family Emergency Response Fund. In this last round of applications, we were able to fund about 460 applicants. We received more than 1,500 applications in that time period. By the end of September, we will have distributed nearly $400,000 in direct cash assistance to more than 740 immigrant and mixed-status households... Not many people see the overwhelming need. [On the application,] the household size is defined by the applicant plus the number of people who are economically dependent on them; when you look at those numbers, 1,500 applicants quickly shoot to 5,000 or 10,000 people who are still left without support.
What other complications has the pandemic caused? One of our volunteer programs accompanies immigrants, most of whom are seeking asylum and waiting for a court date. We accompany them to monthly check-ins to a subcontractor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Those check-ins all stopped in March. They haven’t restarted yet. There’s a lot of uncertainty about what that’s going to look like when offices reopen. While many of them switched to phone or smartphone check-ins, as was mandated by the subcontractor, we know that some folks weren’t able to pay cell phone bills when there was no income.
How can St. Louis support these communities? We have to acknowledge the ways that we have maintained systems of white supremacy and systems of priority based on race in the way that we have designed, built, and governed this city. If we’re going to come out differently, we have to accept and acknowledge that we’ve done that and listen to those communities and make a plan with clear steps and guidelines.
