In a recent article for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Robert Patrick details how refugees are adjusting to life in the city during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Patrick focuses on the International Institute of St. Louis, which works with refugees in St. Louis.

“The institute, which has helped tens of thousands of immigrants resettle in the area over the last 100 years, closed its offices March 16 to visitors and switched to providing services remotely whenever possible,” Patrick reported.

“But the staff still had to pick up people at the airport and stock apartments with furniture and culturally appropriate food.”

It has been a challenge to tell new refugee arrivals to self-isolate and difficult emotionally for them not to explore and to delay “that feeling of home,” according to the institute’s senior vice president for programs, Blake Hamilton.

The COVID-19 pandemic “has created new turmoil for refugees who have escaped war and persecution to resettle in the Chicago region,” writes Katlyn Smith in the Chicago Daily Herald.

Many refugees in Chicago are on the front lines of the pandemic, working as certified nursing assistants or helping manufacture medical supplies, Susan Sperry, regional director for World Relief in the Chicago area, told the Chicago Tribune.

“Jims Porter, spokesman for RefugeeOne, a refugee resettlement agency in Chicago, said the organization’s main concern has been collecting emergency funds for those losing their income. RefugeeOne staff members have been working to help refugees file for unemployment, he said, and have been checking in with each family once a week,” write Elvia Malagon and Nausheen Husain.

Refugee women make masks

Chicago’s WGN recently reported dozens of refugee women in Chicago “have been turning scraps of fabric into masks and gifting them to others, but with a common thread.”

All of the women making masks aregraduates of the RefugeeOne service in Chicago.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, “border closures, suspended asylum programs, interruptions in global transportation and stay-at-home lockdowns have drastically curbed migration around the world, particularly from poorer nations to rich ones,” reports Kirk Semple in the New York Times.

“The pandemic has essentially — not absolutely, but essentially — stopped international migration and mobility dead in its tracks,” said Demetrios G. Papademetriou, co-founder and president emeritus of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, said in the article.

Indeed, in some places, “migratory flows have seemingly made a U-turn, as migrants no longer able to earn a living abroad have decided to return home, even if their home countries are mired in political conflict and economic ruin,” Semple writes.

In a May 1 Op-Ed published in the Houston Chronicle, a group of faith leaders suggest that stimulus check recipients “consider donating their stimulus to an especially needy group — our refugee neighbors.”

As faith leaders, “we have been approached by some of our congregants who are fortunate not to need the stimulus payment. They are comfortably employed or retired. They have ample savings. They see the stimulus payment as a tax policy whose benefit they would prefer to share with those truly in need,” wrote Rt. Rev. C. Andrew Doyle, Rabbi Oren J. Hayon, Sheikh Joe Bradford and Venerable Hung-I.

“We would like to propose that those in this situation consider donating their stimulus to an especially needy group — our refugee neighbors,” the faith leaders wrote.

The White House’s curbing of immigration to the U.S. in response to the COVID-19 pandemic “was in large part repurposed from old draft executive orders and policy discussions that have taken place repeatedly since Mr. Trump took office and have now gained new legitimacy,” the New York Times reported on May 3.

The story puts Miller’s efforts in a disturbing historical context. “The idea that immigrants carry infections into the country echoes a racist notion with a long history in the United States that associates minorities with disease.”