Immigrant Women and the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Intersectional Analysis of Frontline Occupational Crowding in the United States

TL;DR

This study analyzes how immigrant women in the US faced increased occupational crowding in frontline jobs during COVID-19, highlighting racial and gender disparities and expanding the occupational crowding hypothesis.

Contribution

It provides new evidence on the increased occupational crowding of immigrant women during COVID-19 and discusses the implications for wages and occupational health.

Findings

Immigrant women were increasingly crowded in frontline work during COVID-19.

Black and Hispanic US-born workers faced higher COVID-19 exposure but not increased crowding.

The paper expands the occupational crowding hypothesis to include health and wage considerations.

Abstract

This paper examines changes in occupational crowding of immigrant women in frontline industries in the United States during the onset of COVID-19, and we contextualize their experiences against the backdrop of broader race-based and gender-based occupational crowding. Building on the occupational crowding hypothesis, which suggests that marginalized workers are crowded in a small number of occupations to prop up wages of socially-privileged workers, we hypothesize that immigrant, Black, and Hispanic workers were shunted into frontline work to prop up the health of others during the pandemic. Our analysis of American Community Survey microdata indicates that immigrant workers, particularly immigrant women, were increasingly crowded in frontline work during the onset of the pandemic. We also find that US-born Black and Hispanic workers disproportionately faced COVID-19 exposure in their work, but were not increasingly crowded into frontline occupations following the onset of the pandemic. The paper also provides a rationale for considering the occupational crowding hypothesis along the dimensions of both wages and occupational health.