Zahra Babar on Gulf Migrant Workers during the Pandemic
Read the latest publication by Zahra Babar, CIRS Associate Director for Research, on “Migrant Workers Bear the Pandemic’s Brunt in the Gulf,” Current History (December 2020).
In the article, Babar writes “At the global level, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed not only the fragility of public health capacity, but also the persistence of systemic social inequalities. Both North America and Europe, with comparatively robust public health systems and social policy frameworks broadly designed to be inclusive, have provided mounting evidence that minorities and immigrants suffer disproportionately from the effects of COVID-19. The coronavirus itself is not racist or classist in nature, but the outcomes it produces have starkly illuminated preexisting social and economic divides in the countries it afflicts. It has brutally dismantled any residual public complacency that human well-being and health care are somehow sacrosanct, and spared from the worst of our biases and behaviors. This pandemic drives home the dismal fact that there continues to be a strong correlation between one’s status and identity in any given society, and how exposed one is to a disease and its worst outcomes.”