More than two-thirds of Asian American and Pacific Islander healthcare and food supply industry workers, who are helping fight COVID-19, are immigrants, NBC News reports.
That figure comes from recent data by a research fund called New American Economy, which advocates for immigration policies that strengthen the economy.
AAPIs make up about 20 percent of physicians and surgeons, according to the report. Around 14 percent of those AAPI physicians and surgeons are immigrants. One in eleven nurses are AAPI, 75 percent of whom are immigrants. Around 1 in 12 food industry workers are AAPI and around 1 in 18 are AAPI immigrants.
“You think about immigrants making up only about 14 percent of the population,” Andrew Lim, director of quantitative research at the organization, told NBC News. “That’s a huge punching above their weight if you think about it that way, how important immigrants are to the health care system.”
Working on the frontlines of the fight puts Asian American immigrants at risk. In California, 9 food processing plants saw outbreaks just a few weeks ago, according to ABC News.
A large proportion of cases in Lancaster Country, Nebraska were linked to an outbreak at a meatpacking plant called Smithfield foods, where many Latinx and Asian Americans worked. According to the Lincoln Star Journal, racial and ethnic minorities in Lancaster County accounted for two-thirds of coronavirus cases despite making up only 30 percent of the population.
In the United States and the United Kingdom, the coronavirus has had a particularly devastating impact on Filipino nurses. According to FOX 5 NY, the Philippine Nurses Association of America, which began collecting data on Filipino nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic, has documented at least 31 deaths. Many Filipino American nurses are immigrants who came to America when American health care systems needed nurses, Stat News reports.
New American Economy hopes to shed light on the sacrifices immigrant workers are making to help fight the coronavirus. New American Economy recently launched the Immigrants and COVID-19 Portal to demonstrate the role immigrants play in fighting the coronavirus.
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