The COVID-19 Pandemic, the Crisis of Care, and Mexican Immigrants in the United States

Abstract

In the transition from Fordist to flexible accumulation in the last decades of the twentieth century, social reproduction was externalized onto families and communities. In the United States, this “crisis of care” was mitigated by the incorporation of illegalized Mexican immigrants’ low-cost reproductive labor in private and public services. From a feminist perspective on social reproduction and migration, we argue that the impacts of the COVID-19 economic crisis on Mexican immigrant communities were related to the specific ways that immigrants’ labor was incorporated into the circuits of social reproduction. Drawing on interviews with migrants from rural central Mexico in the United States, we analyze how immigrants absorbed the worst effects of the crisis by cheapening their labor, transferring unpaid reproductive labor to other household members, and engaging in informalized activities. Anti-immigrant policies exacerbated the precarious situations of undocumented immigrants and mixed-status Mexican families during the pandemic.