The COVID-19 pandemic, which stands as one of the most significant public health and economic crises of the past century, drew attention to “essential workers” who could not isolate at home, including at least 10 million immigrants without US citizenship.1 Early in the pandemic, essential workers, especially Latinos, were found to be at significantly higher risk of dying than other workers. Given that disproportionate numbers of essential workers and Latino adults are noncitizens, immigration status may be an important but underexamined factor of their heightened mortality risk.
In this issue of AJPH, Riley et al. (p. 1681) present a novel evaluation of differences in excess mortality across immigration statuses during the COVID-19 pandemic.
We live in an era when noncitizens not only endure long-standing systemic exclusions from health but are also experiencing a dehumanizing erosion of their rights. This erosion is driven by a federal executive branch actively demonizing immigrants, a federal judiciary unable to ensure due process, and state governments hesitant to safeguard the few hard-won protections for undocumented immigrants. Amid these circumstances, the notion of the “healthy immigrant” is not only simplistic but actively harmful.
