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The Need for an Immediate and Sweeping Latino Recovery Program

A call for immediate action

By Noreen Sugrue, Director of Research, Latino Policy Forum; and Alejandra Ibáñez, Executive Director, Illinois Unidos

Since the earliest days of the pandemic, the Latino Policy Forum has been arguing for differentiating among what COVID has broken, exposed, and exacerbated while also highlighting COVID’s disproportionate impact on the Latino community. The Forum’s data-driven advocacy has emphasized the need for hyper-local data analysis, equitably allocating resources to redress what COVID has broken, and not using immigration status as a criterion for providing assistance. 

Too often these calls have been unanswered. For example, the reporting of 68.4 percent of vaccine eligible people in Illinois being fully vaccinated paints a somewhat optimistic picture of how we as a state are doing when it comes to one of the best defenses against COVID from any variant, including Omicron. The narrative is that we are doing pretty well; not great, but good. However, when we examine more nuanced or hyper-local data, we find only 55 percent of vaccine-eligible Latinos are fully vaccinated. The somewhat positive narrative is less rosy for Latinos. Far too many Latinos have known since early spring 2020 that members of their community were not faring well. It is fair to say that when things were bad among non-Latinos, they were worse among Latinos. Looking at one particular day, for example, on April 25, 2020, the rate of diagnosed cases among Latinos was 382 per 100,000, 16 percent higher than it was in the state overall.

For Latinos, the lack of an economic cushion, high rates of employment in high-risk essential jobs, the lowest rates of health insurance coverage, the dependence on intergenerational living arrangements in all-too-crowded situations, the digital divide, the language barrier, their children falling further and further behind in school, the lack of access to testing, the lack of access to vaccines, and the inability to socially isolate all come together to create a perfect “COVID storm.”

And just when it was thought things could not get any worse, the perfect storm gained steam thanks to Omicron and transformed the problem of weathering it into something resembling an all-out war. This war is characterized by dramatically increasing numbers of diagnosed cases among Latinos, most notably among those under the age of 20 and alarming age-adjusted mortality data. As of September 7, 2021, the COVID age-adjusted mortality rate among Latinos was 4.8 per 1,000 persons, the highest among all racial/ethnic groups, and an indicator that it is younger Latinos who are dying from COVID.

Between December 28, 2021, and January 4, 2022, just eight days, there were 7,423 newly diagnosed cases of COVID in Latinos under the age of 20, the highest number of any racial/ethnic minority group in the state.

A Large-Scale “Assault” is Required to Tackle the COVID “War”

As with any war, it is necessary to fix what the war breaks and that requires a large-scale domestic economic recovery strategy targeting the community most disproportionately impacted by COVID and who prior to the pandemic was driving growth in population, consumer spending, new homeownership, and labor force participation. In the case of the COVID “war,” it is the Latino community that must be targeted.

This economic recovery program must be based on hyper-local data and address Latinos’ need for housing assistance, unemployment compensation, access to testing, job safety and security, mental health services, education, and food assistance, as well as access to affordable child care and the Internet.

In order to redress devastating social and economic consequences, the country has a long history of large-scale investments both at home and abroad. In thinking about COVID as a war, a war we must win, one large-scale investment program that could be applicable to our current situation is the U.S.-led European Recovery Program, commonly referred to as “The Marshall Plan.” This program was a targeted economic and social stability program aimed at rebuilding and reinforcing the social and economic structures of Western Europe after WWII.

The Latino community today, like Western Europe in the mid-1940s, is key to the overall economic and social stability and strength of the United States. Another analogy for modeling COVID-related large-scale investments in the Latino community is found in a domestic program: The Empowerment Zone Program from the 1990s. This program was aimed at redressing severe economic inequities in poor communities. It required community partnerships and investments; the community members, working in tandem, oversaw large investments that were targeted at creating more economically and socially strong communities. As Illinois Unidos co-founder Xavier Nogueras has said, this program was successful in bringing members of Latino communities together in order to enhance the economic viability of those communities. They provide analogies that when taken together motivate the development of what can be called “The Latino Recovery Program.” 

However, because President Biden says that the full response to recovering from COVID resides with the states assisted by the federal government, recovery from the COVID “war” requires that states, and not the federal government, take the lead in designing and implementing a widescale recovery program. As former Director of Commerce and Economic Opportunity for Illinois Erin Guthrie noted, the economic path of the state is inextricably linked to the economic path of the Latino community. It is for these reasons that the state of Illinois must embark on a domestic “Latino Recovery Program” aimed at rectifying and strengthening the social and economic structures that COVID has broken. 

However, as we embark on the program to “fix what COVID has broken,” it is imperative that elected officials and business leaders also commit to developing and implementing parallel policies, programs, and initiatives aimed at addressing and redressing what COVID has exposed and exacerbated. It is only through these parallel tracks that marginalized communities—Latino, Black, and Indigenous—will recover and flourish. And it is only when each of these communities recovers and flourishes that all recover and flourish.

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