Refugees to the Rescue? Motivating Pro-Refugee Public Engagement During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Migrants are often scapegoated during public health crises. Can such crises create opportunities for migrant inclusion instead? As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, many refugee organizations have stepped up their outreach with stories of refugees helping out in the crisis. We have partnered with the country’s leading refugee advocate organizations to test whether solidarity narratives increase public engagement with refugee advocates. We employ a Facebook experimental design to evaluate the effectiveness of refugee narratives. We test whether (1) migrant narratives framed in the context of COVID-19, (2) COVID-19 migrant narratives targeted to more or less local communities, and (3) COVID-19 migrant narratives labeled as refugee vs. immigrant efforts enhance public engagement with refugee organizations. Our results indicate that migrant narratives framed in the context of COVID-19 do not motivate greater engagement than those that make no mention of the pandemic. Our results provide suggestive evidence that locally targeted efforts motivate greater engagement. Finally, we find no difference between the “refugee” and “immigrant” label, but we show that both labels can motivate greater engagement than ads that include neither. Importantly, this is true even in the context of COVID-19, an uncertain environment where worries of backlash might be warranted. These results suggest promising strategies for migrant policy organizations to promote engagement during and possibly after the pandemic.

The polarization of politics and public opinion and their effects on racial inequality in COVID mortality.

Evidence from the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. indicated that the virus had vastly different effects across races, with black Americans faring worse on dimensions including illness, hospitalization and death. New data suggests that our understanding of the pandemic's racial inequities must be revised given the closing of the gap between black and white COVID-related mortality. Initial explanations for inequality in COVID-related outcomes concentrated on static factors-e.g., geography, urbanicity, segregation or age-structures-that are insufficient on their own to explain observed time-varying patterns in inequality. Drawing from a literature suggesting the relevance of political factors in explaining pandemic outcomes, we highlight the importance of political polarization-the partisan divide in pandemic-related policies and beliefs-that varies over time and across geographic units. Specifically, we investigate the role of polarization through two political factors, public opinion and state-level public health policies, using fine-grained data on disparities in public concern over COVID and in state containment/health policies to understand the changing pattern of inequality in mortality. We show that (1) apparent decreases in inequality are driven by increasing total deaths-mostly among white Americans-rather than decreasing mortality among black Americans (2) containment policies are associated with decreasing inequality, likely resulting from lower relative mortality among Blacks (3) as the partisan disparity in Americans who were "unconcerned" about COVID increased, racial inequality in COVID mortality decreased, generating the appearance of greater equality consistent with a "race to the bottom'' explanation as overall deaths increased and substantively swamping the effects of containment policies.

Years of life lost to COVID-19 in 81 countries.

Understanding the mortality impact of COVID-19 requires not only counting the dead, but analyzing how premature the deaths are. We calculate years of life lost (YLL) across 81 countries due to COVID-19 attributable deaths, and also conduct an analysis based on estimated excess deaths. We find that over 20.5 million years of life have been lost to COVID-19 globally. As of January 6, 2021, YLL in heavily affected countries are 2-9 times the average seasonal influenza; three quarters of the YLL result from deaths in ages below 75 and almost a third from deaths below 55; and men have lost 45% more life years than women. The results confirm the large mortality impact of COVID-19 among the elderly. They also call for heightened awareness in devising policies that protect vulnerable demographics losing the largest number of life-years.