Jack Doppelt
June 5, 2020
[A version of this series of stories was published on Immigrant Connect on Jun 5, 2020]
The spring of 2020 brought fear, death and grief to hundreds of thousands across the globe. In the few months that my students and I were getting to know immigrants and refugees, more than 400,000 people died of the coronavirus pandemic. More than ¼ of them died in the U.S.
As we were meeting for the first times in early April, we decided to focus our reporting on the pandemic’s effect on different immigrant and refugee communities. So many Good Questions can use exploration, so we set out to answer some of them.
What we came to realize is that one of the potential effects of a global pandemic is to recognize that the experiences of migration and decisions about cross-national travel may pull the U.S., willingly or not, out of its exceptionalist posture and into a more cooperative arena. We shall see.
Here are our stories on how the COVID-19 pandemic has effected different immigrant and refugee communities:
In the process of doing the series on COVID-19, we encountered a couple of extraordinary people you should know:
The student reporters wanted you to know something about themselves and their inspiration for investing in reporting on immigrants unlike themselves. The stories are captured here and on the Immigrant Connect staff page:
Svati returns the favor years later By Rachel Baldauf
The life of a refugee is nothing like my life By Michael Fitzpatrick
A snip, snip, here and some family history there By Jason Harward
I realize what it means to choose citizenship – US or Korean By Chloe Jeonghyun Heo
Savta shows me that tradition doesn’t stagnate By Ash Ravid
Ignorance or innocence? The dragons of South Africa are the real Africa to me By Channing Russell
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