Notes on Contributors
Pankaj Baskey is an Indigenous (Santali) Community Researcher with the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) based in West Bengal, India.
Mohan J. Dutta (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) is Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication and the Director of the Center for CultureCentered Approach to Research and Evaluation, developing culturallycentered, community-based projects of social change that articulate health as a human right. His research examines the role of advocacy and activism in marginalizing structures, the relationship between poverty and health, political economy of global health policies, the mobilization of cultural tropes for the justification of neo-colonial health development projects, and how participatory culture-centered processes and strategies of radical democracy serve as axes of global social change.
Suraj Gogoi is a sociologist interested in social, political, and ethical life in South Asia. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, RV University, Bangalore. His forthcoming book Tribal Question and Assamese Identity: Poetics and Politics of Indigeneity (co-authored with Manoranjan Pegu) frames the social and political life in contemporary Assam by situating the figure of the tribal in conversation with caste Assamese society (and culture), official language politics, and the nature of Assamese nationalism. His current research also xiii
engages with regimes of citizenship and the figure of the minority citizensubject in South Asia. He is a social critic and writes regularly on culture, politics, and society in contemporary India.
Samira Hassan is a writer, researcher, and translator who has worked on issues of migration, race, and mental health across Singapore, Bangladesh, and Seoul. His research experience is deeply connected with her grassroots advocacy and activism for migrant worker communities in Singapore.
Pooja Jayan is a Junior Research Officer and Ph.D. student in the Center of Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), School of Communication, Journalism, and Marketing, Massey University, Palmerston North, Aotearoa, New Zealand. Her current research interests are in health communication, specifically looking at health experiences and inequalities among marginalized communities. Her doctoral thesis looks at the health and well-being of migrant Indian nurses in New Zealand. She received the Society for Research on Women Research Award (SROW). In her research projects in New Zealand and India, she engages with migrants, refugees, women, and minority communities experiencing marginalization.
Satveer Kaur-Gill is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice at Dartmouth College. Her research focuses on minority health disparities. Her research projects broadly include (1) racially discordant patient-provider communication, (2) telehealth inequities, (3) health inequalities facing subaltern migrant workers in South East Asia and South Asia, and (4) health inequalities of people whose self-reported income were in the lowest income bracket in Singapore. She received her Master of Science (M.Sc.) in International Public Policy from University College London in 2011 and her Bachelor of Social Science (B.Sc. with Honors) from the National University of Singapore. She is a 2021 National Communication Association, Health Communication Division’s Early Career Award recipient, 2019–2020 US-ASEAN Fulbright Scholarship recipient, and a 2016–2017 Yale Fox Fellow.
Rati Kumar an Assistant Professor at San Diego State University is a critical health communication scholar with a focus on health inequities and culturally situated health interventions. Her work draws on the strand of “health in displacement,” conceptualizing displacement both as spatial
displacement induced by voluntary and forced migratory processes, as well as a meta-level systemic displacement of disenfranchised communities. Her research focuses on centering the cultural knowledge of marginalized communities within mainstream health spaces as agents of structural and policy change. Her recent scholarship focuses on refugees and migrant workers, and in communities and families affected by mass incarceration. Drawing on her ethos as a former student-athlete and law school graduate, she is passionate about action-oriented, communitybased, and policy-focused research.
Indranil Mandal is a Community Researcher with the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) based in West Bengal, India.
Devalina Mookerjee works across research, publishing, and translation in India. Qualitative empirical work in health and education are her primary research interests. After a Ph.D. in Communication, from Purdue University, USA, she has over the last two decades participated in research in 14 states in India, investigating subjects such as educational play, behavior, and understandings of health and hygiene among adults and children, and providing research input to help design interface for online education, among others. Her forthcoming book translates stories of fear by the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan to English from the original Bengali and discusses how narratives of ghost evolve to reflect the culture-specific understandings of a society, looking at itself.
Asha Rathina Pandi is an Independent Consultant and Research Associate with the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), NZ. Her research focuses on marginalized populations in Malaysia, specifically, the intersections of poverty, migrant workers’ rights, social justice, and policy advocacy.
Yeo Qin-Liang is a Researcher whose academic interests include the comparative political economy of development, welfare states, civil society activism, and migrant health. He is also the co-founder of GiftforGood, a non-profit that facilitates in-kind donations to charities across Singapore.
Md. Mahbubur Rahman is a Ph.D. student at the School of Communication, Journalism, and Marketing of Massey University, New Zealand. His primary area of health communication research entails the study of refugee health. He also works as a Research Assistant at the Center for
Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), Massey University where he engages with refugee and new migrant communities of New Zealand utilizing Kaupapa M¯aori theories and Culture-Centered Approach (CCA) methodologies to develop community-led solutions. His primary research interests include health communication, migrant health, refugee health, pharmacy, and medicine. He is also a registered pharmacist of Bangladesh.
Srividya Ramasubramanian is an Indian-American immigrant who moved to the USA in 1999 for her Ph.D. at Penn State University. She is a Presidential Impact Fellow and Professor of Communication at Texas A&M University. Her scholarship focuses on community-oriented media, media literacy, race/ethnicity and media, and mindfulness. She is also the co-founder of Media Rise, a non-profit that brings educators, artists, and activists together to promote meaningful media for social good. She is also a musician, visual artist, and poet.
Anthony Ramirez (PhD, Texas A&M University) is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Houston-Downtown. His research focuses on Latinx and U.S.-Mexico border representation in popular culture and media.
Shubhabrata Roy set up BIAS because it seemed to him that far too many essential research questions about India were going unanswered across academia and industry. With two decades of experience in qualitative empirical research, he specializes in consumer behavior, entrepreneurship, and design thinking, and continues his effort to put together teams that investigate, and provide nuanced and comprehensive answers to questions in human behavior and decision-making in the Indian context.
Rohini Sen is an Assistant Professor at the Jindal Global Law School, O.P Jindal Global University and is pursuing her Ph.D. from the School of Law, University of Warwick as a Chancellor’s Scholar. Her broad research interests are Critical Approaches to International Law (CAIL), critical pedagogy, queer feminist methods and approaches, decolonial and postcolonial theories, and porous intersections of law and social sciences. Her
current research focuses on (a) critical pedagogy and its dialogical relationship with the pedagogue and formal and (b) informal barriers to the workings of Sexual Harassment Committees in Indian Higher Education Institutes. When not struggling to be an academic, she spends her time curating handloom sarees and looking for ways to contaminate the English language through vernacular praxis.
List of Figures
Fig. 11.1 Poster promoting Hindu-Muslim unity circulated via digital platforms (Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation, CARE)
Fig. 11.2 Poster voicing the rights of migrant workers and demanding employment guarantee
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CHAPTER 1
The COVID-19 Pandemic and Precarious Migrants: An Outbreak of Inequality
Satveer Kaur-Gill and Mohan J. Dutta
The COVID-19 pandemic foregrounds the unequal trajectories of infectious diseases globally, coupled with the highly unequal effects of pandemic responses adopted locally, regionally, and nationally (Bojorquez et al., 2021;Elers et al., 2021; Habersaat et al., 2020; Rydland et al., 2022). The patterns of distribution of the burdens of the pandemic both within nation-states and across nation-states drive home the materiality of the vastly unequal terrains of health and well-being that the accelerated expansion of extractive capitalism has caused. These inequalities are constituted by almost five decades of aggressive and relentless pursuit of neoliberal policy-making and are intertwined with inequalities
S. Kaur-Gill (B)
The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA
e-mail: ksatveer@gmail.com
M. J. Dutta
Massey University, Palmerson North, New Zealand
e-mail: m.j.dutta@massey.ac.nz
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023
S. Kaur-Gill and M. J. Dutta (eds.), Migrants and the COVID-19 Pandemic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7384-0_1
in the distribution of wealth, income, and opportunity (Dutta, 2016). The pursuit of the free market as a panacea, pushed relentlessly by international financial institutions, has shaped the management of politics, economics, and society globally, albeit in variegated forms (Brenner et al., 2010). The zeitgeist of neoliberalism, based on the singular commitment to promoting the free market, has targeted and re-arranged aspirations, desires, and imaginations across spaces, fundamentally constituting health risks at the margins of global economies (Dutta, 2016).
In the process of establishing the free market as the panacea to global problems that have been propelled by the aggressive pursuit of the free market, from hunger and poverty to well-being and climate change, neoliberal reforms have established and perpetuated exploitative labor regimes that thrive on the legitimization of diverse modes of exploitation (Collins & Rothe, 2019; Chomsky, 1998; Dutta, 2017). The twin forces of expelling the poor from their livelihood through continually expanding extractive practices and then incorporating them into the global networks of production, constitute the exploitative infrastructures of neoliberal economies. Migration forms a critical and necessary infrastructure in the neoliberal pursuit of new spaces of extraction, with discardable migrant bodies, without labor rights and pathways of access to citizenship-based protections serving as drivers of accelerated growth. The futuristic registers for smart and sustainable urban organizing are built on the invisibilization and erasure of hyper-precarious migrants. Even as global discourses of profitability have turned toward incorporating and commoditizing sustainability as a rhetorical device, the exploitation of expendable migrants underpins the architecture continually promoted in the sustainability narrative.
Through communicative inversions, referring to the turning of materiality on its head via communication processes (Dutta, 2020), the very problems that have resulted from the aggressive pursuit of neoliberal reforms have been configured as the targets of neoliberal policy-making. More neoliberalism and the greater and faster pursuit of the free market have been posed as the necessary transformations to produce sustainable growth, address climate change, and improve population-level health and well-being. The current neoliberal formations incorporate digital technologies as catalysts for resource extraction and labor exploitation (Chakrabarty, 2019; Dutta & Kaur-Gill, 2018; Grossi & Pianezzi, 2017). These digital platforms, on the one hand, exploit the labor of hyperprecarious migrant workers and are located in architectures built through
worker exploitation, and on the other hand, form the communicative infrastructures for propagating the neoliberal seductions that expel the poor from the Global South into the neoliberal labor chains. The narrative structures that hold up the exploitation of migrants in global labor chains are circulated via communicative inversions, often narrated and distributed through digital platforms, cultivating images of upward mobility, opportunity, and sustainability attached to smart urban utopias. The futuristic “Smart City” and the dreams it weaves perpetuate the ongoing exploitation of migrants. The production of the futuristic urban digital infrastructure forms the frontiers of neoliberal expansion, branded as sustainability. Images of futuristic urban infrastructures and digitally mediated spaces actively erase the everyday practices of exploitation of migrants and the erasure of migrant rights.
The persistence of the neoliberal order has historically depended on its communicative infrastructure, deploying propaganda to uphold the uncritical celebration of the free market. The communicative construction of smart, urban, sustainable futures has been organized to draw in investments, re-organize resources, and deploy accelerated projects of development sold as emancipatory futures (Dutta, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c). Migration is embedded within this neoliberal ideology and incorporated as an instrument for creating and promoting profitable spaces for global capital, forming the very infrastructural basis for the construction of smart cities. As infrastructures, industries, and technologies have been strategically arranged to serve the agendas of transnational capital, they have drawn on the continual supply of cheap and disposable labor. In other words, both extraction and exploitation work hand-in-hand, with migration playing a critical role in the global circuit of capital. The movement of cheap, discardable, and exploitable labor into spaces of accelerated exploitation enables transnational capital to generate the greatest profits, feeding the networks of investors and shareholders. In contrast, migrant workers reap the least from the accelerated growth. The perpetuation of accelerated growth contributes to and draws on deeply exploitative practices targeting migrants employed in precarious conditions without labor rights and the right to raise their voices. By keeping resources to a minimum, such as the cost of migrant wages, practices such as indenture of hiring, poor housing and sanitation, limited access to health resources, and low occupational safety standards are perpetuated in these industries. All to maximally extract profits from the labor of low-wage migrants. During a pandemic, these inequalities are amplified, but also
are rendered visible, depicting how outbreaks manifest unequally for certain communities and workers at the margins. During the COVID19 pandemic, precarious migrant populations faced uneven outbreak inequalities, coupled with being placed under amplified forms of already existing surveillance and control. The inequalities related to the COVID19 pandemic are reflected in the interpenetrating structures of capitalism, colonialism, and racism.
This edited collection foregrounds the everyday precarities negotiated by migrants at the margins of global neoliberal transformation amidst the pandemic. Drawing from multi-method approaches, the collection examines the negotiations of COVID-19 within the context of migration. Offering a corrective to the dominant approach to migration and global health communication that takes a culturally essentialist approach, we turn to migrant experiences at the margins employing a structural analysis. Migration constitutes the context of structural violence in global neoliberal economies, reflected in the disproportionate burdens of health risks borne by migrants at the margins. This book attends to the question, how are migrants experiencing the pandemic amidst the features of extreme (im)mobility introduced by the lockdown policy responses across global spaces? Pandemic related extreme (im)mobility in the context of precarious migrants refers to the structural formations of the infrastructures of migration, policy responses in response to COVID-19, placing migrant workers and migrants at the borders under surveillance, and limiting the movement of migrants in, between, and across spaces. Migration, dependent upon policies that enable mobilities across spaces (Dutta & Kaur-Gill, 2018), is framed within the contexts of (im)mobility introduced by the lockdown measures and other preventive responses. Traversing across geographically diverse spaces, both within the Global South and in the Global North, the essays weave together the negotiations of migration as the register for making sense of health.
The Relationship Between Outbreak and Communicative Inequalities
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected vulnerable populations disproportionately around the globe. Precarious migrants faced unequal health consequences and threats from the pandemic differently from non-mobile citizens. The impact of the pandemic on precarious migrants requires serious attention and interrogation for its disproportionately large effects
on the health and well-being of migrant workers toiling on global labor chains. The vast inequalities of the pandemic burden are intertwined with communicative inequalities, reflecting the inequalities in the distribution of communication resources, both resources for information and resources for voice (Dutta, 2016, 2020, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c). Communicative inequalities go beyond mapping the distribution patterns of communication technologies (e.g., access issues) and interrogate how the distribution of communicative resources is organized. For example, communicative inequalities ask how preventive health information and messages are constructed and deployed. How did states manage, direct, and relay public health messages to the population during a pandemic? What are the communicative avenues for voice, representation, and participation by those most disenfranchised during the pandemic? These questions center our analysis of communicative inequalities and their relationship to outbreak inequalities.
The precarity facing migrant laborers often refers to the condition of being casual and disposable from largely fragile working conditions and is marked by communicative inequality. Precarious migrants, working in the casual, unorganized, and contract-less sectors, are largely unprotected, working in special economic zones or urban hubs marked as the sites of unfettered capitalist expansion and therefore outside the ambits of labor regulations. These spaces, sold as spaces for urban futurism, are the destination hubs for global capitalist investment, particularly investments by the technology and financial sectors (Dutta, 2021a). The ease of flow of capital, projects, investments, and futuristic architectures in specially designated spaces of futurism is enabled through the authoritarian repression of organized labor and criminalization of worker dissent. Migrant workers remain largely erased from the spaces of urban organizing, with limited to no access to communicative infrastructures for structurally-based information, representation, participation, and voice. The structures of neoliberal capitalism shape communicative inequalities and, in turn, are connected with health inequalities experienced by migrants.
The jarring health disparities facing precarious migrants have been documented worldwide. Refugees, migrant domestic and construction workers, low-wage migrant laborers, and undocumented migrants are some examples of precarious migrants (Bhopal, 2020; Dutta, 2020, 2021a; Jamil & Dutta, 2021; Kaur-Gill et al., 2021; Martuscelli, 2021;
Mookerjee et al., 2021; Nasol & Francisco-Menchavez, 2021; Sanfelici, 2021;Ye, 2021) that faced significant health disparities when the pandemic unfolded. The precarity of migrants in a pandemic made evident how the health of migrants is situated in a system of exploitative capitalist structures. Cramped and crowded spaces of rest and living, overworked, a lack of access to nutritious food, intermittent or poor wages, and facing digital limitations, precarious migrants are embedded in an ecological system of structural injustices. These structural injustices are coupled with an evolving pandemic where public health messages are arranged via Eurocentric logics on behavior change as individual efforts through health promotion (Dutta, 2005, 2021b), such as masking up, sanitizing, and social distancing. These acts are viewed as behavioral responses to stay safe from infections. Migrant health communication within the hegemonic framework promotes messages, reducing migrants to cultural essences and occupying themselves with the design of effective, culturally sensitive, tailored, and targeted messages. Lopez and Neely (2021), however, remind us that the health of the racialized body must be recognized through the lens of society, where the health or illness of the individual body is very much socially and communicatively configured to the larger (in)justices in society.
Therefore, these types of health information messages fail to account for the plight of migrants living in overcrowded spaces, with little material resources to access masks, sanitizers, or soaps, and make it impossible to socially distance themselves. These conditions are all part of the broader structures of precarity that operate in the context of migrant lives. Furthermore, during a pandemic, the difficulty for precarious migrants to access similar material resources to protect themselves from infectious disease outbreaks compared to the rest of the population is uneven and unequal. Thus, individual behavior change that relies on the individual to garner and maintain material resources of health protection fails to address the disproportionate outbreaks among these population groups, leaving the structures intact. Moreover, in minimizing the role of the structure in shaping migrant health at the margins, this body of scholarship contributes to the further hyper-precarization and exploitation of workers. They turn migrant workers into cultural essences constructed within the ambits of the hegemonic ideology, extract cultural characteristics, and then target these cultural characteristics. Simultaneously, migrant bodies and responses are turned into data, directed toward the fine-tuning of effective health messages. Hegemonic health messaging
is complemented by authoritarian strategies of surveillance and disciplining targeting migrant workers. The individualized culturalist health messaging, alongside the technologies of surveillance and discipline, work together to obfuscate the serious and gross violations of labor and human rights of migrants at the margins.
In Singapore, for example, migrant construction workers live in overcrowded dormitories (see Dutta, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c). These dormitories house approximately 20 workers in a room, making social distancing impossible or an irrelevant health measure in the context of the poor living conditions experienced by migrant workers. Many workers shared bar soaps, water taps, and restrooms, and had no access to sanitizers (Dutta, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c). Therefore, dominant public health messages that focused on the acquisition of masks, sanitizers, and social distancing failed to consider the disparities among populations unable to carry out these behaviors due to the lack of material resources and the inability to locate spaces for effective social distancing. Public health messages were not responsive to how migrant infrastructures embedded in precarity amplify health vulnerabilities in a pandemic (Dutta, 2021c, 2022).
This edited volume, interested in questions of communicative inequalities and the interlinkages to health disparities, will broadly outline the role of precarious structural conditions, reproducing communicative inequalities for migrants, bringing attention to a need for structurally responsive health systems for precarious populations. The role of health communication is shifted from one of creating techniques for effective message delivery to health organizing for structural transformation in solidarity with the margins (Dutta et al., 2019). When discussing the role communicative inequalities play in exacerbating precarious conditions for migrants, this overview chapter seeks to theorize communicative inequalities in the context of outbreak inequalities as a critical conceptual anchor. The chapter discusses the global context of migrant health and the structural conditions of (im)mobilities faced by migrants in the margins, tied to how communicative inequalities contribute to outbreak inequalities. Entrenched in systems that organize (im)mobilities of migrants (Adey et al., 2021), we discuss how health messages, health infrastructures, and health systems have been conditioned for exclusion and exploitation.
Communicative disparities are set up to reflect how migrants faced outbreak inequalities across the globe during the pandemic. The extreme
risks and infections faced by migrants, including other structural disparities, will be highlighted in the chapters selected to provide an overview of the various sections that will draw on their voices in research. In the backdrop of their ongoing erasure, migrants enact their agency through their participation in interpretive processes to make sense of the structures, the everyday negotiations of structures, and the organizing to challenge the authoritarian repression and technologies of controlling labor. Worker organizing and worker articulations foreground registers of resistance as the basis for securing worker health. Moreover, in the backdrop of the large-scale deployment of digital platforms to disseminate hate as a strategy for enacting capitalist power and control carried out by the authoritarian state, migrant worker organizing offers opportunities for social change.
Precarities as Ecological
Low-skilled migrants worldwide faced significant outbreak inequalities during the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., Dutta, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c; Jamil & Dutta, 2021; Kaur-Gill et al., 2021; Mookerjee et al., 2021; Pandey et al., 2021). Outbreak inequalities are profoundly connected to how such hyper-precarious work functions in neoliberal societies that disenfranchise migrant health. Migrants are entrenched in precarious structures for the benefit of capital (Dutta, 2020). Limiting workers’ access to health systems and infrastructures allows for greater profit extraction from the bodies of these workers (Dutta, 2017; Dutta & Kaur-Gill, 2018). Kathiravelu (2021) argues that the role of unequal structures causes far greater vulnerabilities and shocks to migrant populations in a pandemic, describing this as infrastructural (in)justice faced by precarious migrant populations. These injustices are institutionally governed, shaping how institutions distribute resources inequitably during the COVID-19 pandemic (Kathiravelu, 2021).
Precarious employment structures of low-wage migrant workers, such as construction workers, day laborers, essential front-line workers, and domestic workers, create conditions in which low-wage migrants are discursively erased, materially minimized, and disengaged, resulting in communicative erasures at multiple categories of health needs. The consequence of absence and access during the COVID-19 pandemic amplifies the many disparities that migrants face during social crises. Therefore, when the pandemic occurred, precarious groups such as
migrants were most vulnerable, especially as mobile subjects, removed from the conditions of mobility to (im)mobility (Adey et al., 2021). Viswanath et al. (2020) point out that communicative inequalities were intensified when public health communication messages failed to recognize differences in how health information is accessed, retrieved, and processed for vulnerable groups, resulting in more significant structural inequities for marginalized groups. Furthermore, Dutta (2016) notes that these communicative inequalities need to address communicative resources geared toward structural access to health and well-being. For example, in Singapore, the lack of public communication messages that address the structural contexts of migrant work shaped the vast health inequalities experienced by migrant construction workers. Typically erased from mainstream discursive sites, both policy discourses and academic discourses constituted within the infrastructures of state propaganda, migrant construction workers were the primary victims of the COVID-19 outbreak by April 2020, facing disproportionate numbers of infections. Dutta (2021a, 2021b, 2021c) noted the communicative features of structural violence in global migration, drawing attention to the communicative inequalities that constitute migrant health. The organizing of spaces for migrants are riddled in the logic of neoliberalism, with living spaces for migrants being rendered invisible. Structures of citizenship are organized to erase the voices of migrants, with low-wage migrant workers violently cut off from accessing pathways to citizenship. Their bodies, toiling to build the infrastructure of the city, are to be discarded after their use. Drawing on the concept “margins of the margins,” Dutta (2021b) elucidates the complex and intertwined structures of communicative erasure, tied to the disenfranchisement of migrants from pathways of citizenship. Citizenship, therefore, is a key resource in the disenfranchisement of migrant rights, and in the simultaneous incorporation of migrants at the “margins of the margins” as hyper-precarious and discardable labor in extreme neoliberal formations. Team and Anderson (2020) described how the pandemic amplified structural vulnerabilities, identifying structural vulnerabilities as social, geographic, and physical systems that intersect to create conditions that impact the health of those living in vulnerable conditions. For example, labor conditions of precarious migrants were connected to crowded and dilapidated housing, job and food insecurity, and infectious disease transmission, leading to poor health protections (Dutta, 2021a; Jamil & Dutta, 2021; Kaur-Gill, 2020).
Jamil and Dutta (2021) identified the communicative circulation of otherness of low-wage migrant workers from Bangladesh living in the Middle East, hired to be placed outside mainstream spaces for exclusion in the host country. Through exclusion, communicative, and structural, the migration infrastructures profit from keeping low-wage migrants voiceless, isolated, and exploited. Their exclusion leaves them underserved in various ways, including health outcomes. The documented effects of the structural violence that impact the bodies of workers are deeply entrenched in how the employment structures of such work perpetuate rife inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, Mookerjee et al. (2021) report how internal migrants in India working in construction, as day laborers, or as domestic workers, an essential labor force in the cities, had to return to their villages abruptly. When the COVID-19 outbreak occurred, they were given mere hours to leave, reifying their status as dispensable workers. The exodus of workers from the cities, some by foot over long journeys, caused death, sickness, mounting debt, limited access to health infrastructures, and job insecurity. Workers hailing from rural villages and towns often took on debt to travel to the city for work. Thus, the debt amount ballooned for workers without employment, adding significant stress because of the now compounded debt trap. Upon return to their villages, they were also stigmatized as virus carriers during lockdowns, creating cycles of mental health violence tied to work, community, and social relations.
In the United States, Pandey et al. (2021) examined how migrant domestic workers faced further exploitation through expanded labor roles. Workers were found to have greater workloads, with little to no power to ask for better compensation from the stark power dynamics concentrated in the hands of employers. This also placed them at further health precarity with limited health insurance access, despite employers’ heightened dependency on domestic workers while in lockdown (Pandey et al., 2021). The informality and dispensability of conducting such work implicate how domestic workers negotiate communicative resources for better labor and health conditions. Furthermore, accessing and adopting protective gear for health safety were absent, leaving workers between difficult choices to protect themselves or facing intermittent job loss and income. When studying precarious migrants, the environment of hire in which they are situated informs where poor health indicators occur. The connection between labor and health informs health outcomes.
The connection between the macro narratives of economic and material precarity to the micro levels of how their health inequalities are experienced reflects the ecological cycle of health vulnerabilities for migrants.
Similarly, in Malaysia, there are approximately 3.5 million migrants, of which an estimated 1.3 million are irregular migrants. They constitute refugees and asylum seekers, with irregular migrants often conducting domestic, construction, manufacturing, and agricultural work in Malaysia. Somiah (2022) details the ecological precarity of irregular migrants in Sabah, Malaysia. Stigmatized as social threats, their status as irregular migrants constituted their experiences in the host country as subjects for hyper-surveillance, often raided, interrogated, and threatened by state officials and agents. Somiah (2021) posit that the processes through which migrants are documented in Sabah, such as their illegal status, reinforce their threatening presence as unmanageable and, therefore, problematic. During the early onset of the outbreak in 2020, undocumented irregular migrants were subjected intensively to hyper-surveillance. State officials actively raided these communities under the guise of medical surveillance, eventually deporting this population group. Wahab (2020) reported that these very detention centers became active COVID-19 clusters due to the neglected, crowded, cramped, and unhygienic conditions. To add, precarious migrants in Malaysia were confronted with job losses from the irregularity of their work, resulting in issues of hunger and food insecurity. In addition, literacy issues left migrants without the information required on preventative health behaviors and COVID-19-related information. These factors later led to extreme health disparities faced by undocumented migrants in the country (Wahab, 2020).
Jamil and Dutta (2021) studied the social media discourses of Bangladeshi migrant workers, identifying how interconnected disparities were experienced by precarious migrant workers during the pandemic. Once again, the precarity of low-skilled migration leaves workers at risk of job insecurity, mental health violence, and mounting debt. However, the COVID-19 pandemic made these insecurities even more complex. The responsibility of performing low-skilled migrant work such as domestic and construction work meant being left unemployed during the pandemic, leaving workers facing job insecurity and causing mental anguish. Workers were also ushered into groups for testing procedures, with workers cramped into living arrangements that made them more prone to outbreaks. Jamil and Dutta’s (2021) study indicated serious
labor and health violations and abuses of Bangladeshi workers residing in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. This included workers being crammed into rooms or living spaces or rendered homeless during the pandemic. The interconnectedness of the lived experiences of precarious migrants during the pandemic requires a global response that accounts for the migration infrastructures that keep workers in a constant state of marginalization. Migrant infrastructures refer to the interconnected physical, digital, and organizational structures that account for migrant lives, labor, and health, made up of policies, resources, roles, and processes (Leurs, 2019). The absence or erasure from communicative resources, both resources for voice and information resources, are part of how the migrant infrastructures keep migrants in the margins of the host country.
Several chapters in this book will discuss these interconnections in the context of COVID-19 infections that resulted in jarring health inequalities for migrants.
Health Information
Communicative erasures are marked by how migrant workers are excluded from health infrastructures. Erased from mainstream health organizing, workers are left without resources to organize for themselves and seek out health information they require during the pandemic. Being discursively and socially erased from mainstream society can mean facing minimal consideration from national COVID-19 health policies and procedures. In India, the sweeping lockdowns by the government added to the poor health of precarious migrants in the city (Mookerjee et al., 2021). In Singapore, the rife outbreak inequality of COVID-19 infections felt by migrant construction workers during the pandemic was reinforced by poor living conditions and weak structural mechanisms to protect labor conditions. Within the context of their minimization and elimination, workers were initially absent from COVID-19 response plans (Chan & Kuan, 2020), causing confusion, chaos, and further vulnerabilities for exploited workers. Communicative erasures and exclusions directly impact the health consequences of precarious migrants, who, for example, were suddenly expelled out of cities in India with little consequences for their health rights.
When conducting in-depth interviews through various digital tools with migrant construction workers, one of us noted the ways in which the workers shared the lack of response and deliberate ignorance of
their employers to implement measures to protect workers. During an interview via a Facebook Messenger call, Shabir shared:
Yeah, yesterday I so many times I tell him, I don’t want to go tomorrow work because my nearest room, already positive, but they don’t want to listen. They tell me, you okay you stay whatever we take decision, after we inform you. Already I come to work, my room, all people come to work.” Despite the chaos within their dormitory settings regarding the separation of infected workers from noninfected workers, workers were told to continue working at construction sites.
Health information resources and messages were severely lacking for migrant workers causing confusion, fear, and chaos. An activist physician in Singapore who provided translation services for health information to Bangladeshi migrant workers revealed the organic and evolving nature of medical translation work, amid the staggering number of COVID-19 infections that rose among migrant construction workers in April 2020. She shared how misinformation added to the morale of workers.
…when the workers are told that they are being quarantined, just quarantined, because they don’t have just nothing, just quarantined, they start crying because they think they’re going to die. That’s the amount of fear in the workers right now. And the amount of misinformation, I would say, which is why [name of translator] would have a kind of a group to create like a COVID fact sheet at a certain point
Being excluded meant being left out of dominant public health communication messages. Public health communication messages did not include tailored messages for migrant workers. Furthermore, public health communication messages in Singapore started to distinguish “two curves,” listing infections among migrant construction workers separately from the local population. These strategies of “othering” workers also meant “othering” them from COVID-19 health communication messages, leaving civil society organizations in the initial stages of the outbreak scrambling to bridge these information gaps (Chan & Kuan, 2020;Yuenetal., 2021). Shared by another migrant worker activist in Singapore regarding strategies for organizing,
…when we recognized that COVID would have a serious disproportionate impact on our migrant community…we put out a mailing list… to compile
a list of the needs of different groups…and initiatives put in place to meet these needs…with this compilation… we were able then able to branch out into organizing some form of a response.
Workers interviewed during the early periods of the outbreak shared how infected workers were sharing resources such as water coolers, toilets, and charging facilities with non-infected workers due to the limited dormitory infrastructures and the cramped conditions of these living sites. Furthermore, the precarization of migrant construction work in Singapore meant having to make difficult decisions between not getting paid for missing work or risking getting infected by continuing work on construction sites. In Singapore, migrant workers revealed fears of wage theft from their employers, and cycles of debt traps that would follow as stressors. The movement restrictions they faced during the pandemic also meant worrying about remitting salaries to their families back home. The extreme neoliberalism at work in authoritarian states, such as Singapore, Malaysia, UAE, and Qatar, in the hiring and managing low-wage workers have grave implications for worker health and mental health. Dutta (2020) defines this phenomenon of extreme neoliberalism “as the ideology of the free market implemented by an authoritarian state through technologies of violence” (p. 2), where the authoritarian state manages workers for exclusion. Through exclusion and repression that pathologizes organizing and resistance across civil society as problematic, the differential management and treatment of workers is legitimized through the hegemonic narrative of “Asian values” as opposed to a human rights framework (Koh et al., 2017).
Some dormitory operators isolated infected workers in locked rooms without their phone charges, creating a communicative vacuum and therefore, perpetuating the conditions of extreme (im)mobility. As a result, workers could not access information on the steps being taken, the rapid changes being implemented in the dormitories, and the communicative infrastructures that would point them to the necessary resources for prevention. Civil society groups, activists, and NGOs began translating health information messages to migrant workers when they were spotlighted as “health threats” in Singapore (Ye, 2021). Salient here is the role of academic expertise in the erasure of the violence experienced by low-wage migrant workers, with an architecture of expertise established in such regimes to whitewash oppressive state-capitalist practices in worker exploitation. For instance, the everyday reality of sometimes more
