******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
Washington Post, JULY 18, 2020
‘I’m scared’
Black people — many of them immigrants — make up less than 2 percent of
Maine’s population but almost a quarter of its coronavirus cases
Maine does not collect data for immigrants, following federal
guidelines, but officials said contact tracing showed that many of those
affected are immigrants or their children. The population of Lewiston,
shown here, includes refugees.
By Maria Sacchetti
WESTBROOK, Maine — Workers at a red-brick factory called American Roots
had to decide amid a pandemic whether to come back to work. Instead of
the usual sweatshirts and knit caps, they would churn out masks to
protect front-line workers from the novel coronavirus. Or they could
take the safer route: Stay home and collect unemployment.
Almost all were immigrants from Africa or the Middle East, and workers
said none of them flinched when they gathered on the factory floor that
morning in March. Everyone voted to keep stitching.
“I’m not scared,” said Maria Lutina, 42, an asylum seeker from Angola
and the factory’s head stitcher who helped design the masks. “Americans,
they need it.”
Immigrants and refugees help power Maine, America’s oldest and whitest
state, by picking blueberries, packing meat and tending to the elderly
far from the fancy resorts on Vacationland’s rocky coast. But in a state
that has one of the lowest rates of coronavirus infections, a pattern
has emerged: Black Mainers — many of them immigrants — have been
infected at disproportionate rates, accounting for approximately 23
percent of the cases in a state where they are less than 2 percent of
the population. American Roots has not been spared; state officials
announced Thursday that 11 employees have tested positive for the virus.
Two of the state’s 115 coronavirus deaths have been among black Mainers,
who health officials said tend to be younger and less likely to exhibit
symptoms of the virus’s disease, covid-19. But advocates for immigrants
say many have been ill, and a state lawmaker warned that black residents
in Maine and nationwide are facing the “twin pandemics” of systemic
racism that hinders access to health care, and a virus that has
disproportionately infected people of color.
The most recent state data show that at least 836 of more than 3,600
Mainers who have had the coronavirus are black. Maine does not collect
data for immigrants, following federal guidelines, but officials said
contact tracing showed that many of those affected are immigrants or
their children. Latinos account for a smaller number of cases, about 145
infections.
Leaders of immigrant organizations said Maine initially was slow to
offer testing, provide bilingual contact tracers and directly invest in
immigrant organizations that know the communities best. Much of the
initial funding went to mostly white-led organizations that subcontract
with immigrant groups.
State officials say they are scrambling to address the racial disparity
by expanding testing and health care, and finding ways to provide direct
aid to immigrant groups to prevent the virus’s spread. Officials are
also hiring more bilingual staff members and have translated coronavirus
information into at least 11 other languages.
“We know we’ve had long-standing racial disparities in our health-care
system, and we know that racism is a problem in Maine, as it is
elsewhere,” said Jeanne Lambrew, the state’s Health and Human Services
commissioner. “So we are trying to obviously act with urgency because we
are trying to prevent what we’re seeing from getting worse.”
Nationwide, the vast majority of black people are native-born U.S.
citizens, according to the Census Bureau, but in more than a dozen
states including New York, Massachusetts, the Dakotas and Minnesota,
large shares of the black population are immigrants. They face racial
discrimination and language or cultural barriers that can impede efforts
to stop the coronavirus’s spread, such as public briefings about the
pandemic that are only in English.
Almost half the black people in Maine are immigrants, the highest share
in the nation. Most are from African nations including Somalia and the
Democratic Republic of Congo.
[Maine’s Vacationland hot spots are ghost towns as tourism struggles
amid coronavirus]
Although the spread of the coronavirus among black residents has slowed
in recent weeks, advocates for immigrants warn that conditions in Maine
are ripe for a spike in infections if officials do not reach immigrants
directly.
Ines Mugisha, a 34-year-old immigrant from Burundi, said her husband, a
home health-care aide for people with mental disabilities, caught the
virus in recent weeks and spread it to her and their young children,
including an 18-month old son. She said the couple had fevers and
headaches, and they have recovered.
“We’re still scared,” she said.
Fatuma Hussein, a Somali refugee and community leader in Lewiston, a
city of 36,000 about an hour’s drive from Westbrook, said advocates knew
instantly that the fast-spreading coronavirus “would be a disaster” for
immigrants — one reason they urged the state to ramp up efforts to
prevent the virus’s spread. Many immigrants have large families with
eight to 10 children packed into tenements in the state’s cities. They
carpool to work and the grocery store, and some wrongly believed the
virus would not affect them.
“Both sides, they weren’t working for us,” said Hussein, the executive
director of the Immigrant Resource Center of Maine, based in Lewiston.
“And then it was too late.”
The criticism overshadowed a new gubernatorial administration that has
attempted to strike a more welcoming tone for immigrants, who account
for less than 4 percent of Maine’s population. But immigrants are
increasingly filling jobs as home health-care aides and grocery store
clerks in a state that had more deaths than births last year.
Former governor Paul LePage, a white Republican who left office last
year after term limits kicked in, had attempted to block refugees from
coming to Maine, and called asylum seekers the state’s biggest problem.
Mainers replaced him with Gov. Janet Mills, a white Democrat who had
defended immigrants as the state attorney general and welcomed hundreds
of asylum seekers from Africa last year after they showed up at the
southern U.S. border with Mexico.
Mills said she would meet with representatives of immigrant, racial and
ethnic groups about the coronavirus and pledged to “work to reduce these
inequities.”
“It is deeply disheartening, and, frankly, unacceptable to me that Maine
is confronting such significant racial disparities,” Mills said in a
statement, adding that the pandemic “has laid bare the deep-seated
inequities and racism in our society that deserve our attention.”
[Maine families face elder boom, worker shortage]
Fatuma Hussein, center, executive director of the Immigrant Resource
Center of Maine in Lewiston, gives masks to kids playing basketball at a
park in Auburn, Maine, on July 9.
On a warm summer afternoon last week in downtown Lewiston, on a street
lined with Somali shops and groceries that some call “Little Mogadishu,”
Hussein and an assistant used some of their funding to canvass the
neighborhood to hand out masks and information about where to get a
coronavirus test.
As soon as Hussein stepped into the street, traffic stopped. Drivers
waved. Pedestrians shouted hello. A woman stuck her head out a
first-floor window and said she did not have any masks for her family.
“How many do you need, my sister?” Hussein called out.
“Ten, all of us. Thank you,” said Makia Djidrine, a 35-year-old who fled
the Central African Republic and is now a naturalized U.S. citizen. She
has two children. Her brother has six.
Hussein said it is this type of direct canvassing that can make the
biggest difference for immigrants. Many fled violent regimes and do not
trust the government. But they trust Hussein.
Makia Djidrine, a 35-year-old refugee from the Central African Republic,
speaks out a window to Fatuma Hussein in Lewiston last week.
As she made her way to Kennedy Park, three maskless young Somali women
tried to dodge Hussein as they glided down the street.
“I’m your auntie,” Hussein scolded them in English and Somali. “You
can’t just walk away.”
Wishing they were at the beach, instead of listening to a lecture about
covid-19, they rolled their eyes at Hussein and her bag of masks.
“We can’t breathe in the mask,” one, who declined to give her name.
Each took a mask and put it on, and some extras to bring home.
“You know we’ve had a lot of coronavirus,” Hussein said seriously.
“Please tell your relatives.”
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
