By Women’s Budget Group

We are seeing how immigration and social security policies aimed at creating a ‘hostile environment’ have exacerbated the impact of Covid-19 on all migrants, with particular impacts on migrant women and their ability to provide for their families. A reckoning is due in how we treat migrant women, an undervalued group overrepresented in keeping our society afloat.

Women are at higher risk of exposure in their jobs because they represent 77% of workers in high-exposure sectors like health and social care. Overrepresented in customer-facing roles like retail and hospitality, women, young people and low-income workers are also bearing the brunt of the shutdown.

Our social care sector and our NHS are heavily dependent on the labour, skills and experience of migrants and women.

Women are 77% of the NHS workforce and migrants account for over 13% of workers in our national health system (8% of the population). Certain professions within the NHS are even more reliant on migrant labour: among doctors, the proportion is 29% and among nurses the figure is 18%.

Social care, the ‘second frontline’ but the poor cousin of the healthcare system, has been ravaged by the virus while receiving delayed attention from government. Its workforce is predominantly (83%)  female and migrants make up 16% of workers in the sector. Care workers are highly exposed to the virus and access to PPE has been very limited. Domiciliary care workers are potential vectors of infection because they visit multiple homes to provide care. Direct care is even more reliant on migrants than the average, with 37% of registered nurses non-British.

It does not seem fair that many people at the forefront of this crisis, saving lives and caring for our most vulnerable members, are being asked to pay twice for the NHS through their taxes and the immigration health surcharge, a requirement for any visa into the UK.

Many other jobs that are keeping us and our children cared for, fed, clean and warm, have precarious and too often exploitative conditions, and are low paid. A quarter of social care workers are on zero-hours contracts and women in the sector earn poverty wages. Many migrant women in childcare, cleaning, retail, etc are earning the minimum wage or less, so even though they can be furloughed, 80% of earnings would tip them into poverty.

In cleaning, another sector heavily affected by the lockdown, a quarter of the workforce are migrants, mostly women. Zero-hours contracts and self-employment are very usual and even though these workers can also be put on furlough they are more likely to see their hours cut or dismissed altogether.

Job precarity is worse for migrant women because they don’t have a safety net to fall back on. Most have no recourse to public funds which means that, contrary to many low-paid British workers, they cannot apply for Universal Credit, tax credits or housing benefit to supplement their earnings. In-work poverty is thus rife for migrant women.

Juggling work and care responsibilities when schools are closed and informal help is not possible is proving very hard for many families. For migrant women, most of whom can’t access the full 30-hour entitlement of childcare, these circumstances are disastrous. Paying for extra hours of childcare might prove unaffordable. As a result, many key workers quite literally can’t afford to work because they have to take care of their families.

The coronavirus pandemic is exacerbating another public health crisis: that of male violence against women. If migrant women are victims of domestic abuse, they will find it much harder to escape, since refuges cannot afford to house women with no recourse as underfunded women’s organisations rely on housing benefit to fund their shelters. Homelessness support and social housing are barred to migrant women with NRPF.

Specialist organisations led by and for BME and migrant women, who bore the brunt of austerity cuts in the last 10 years, will be overstretched once the lockdown ends and the expected spike in women seeking help happens.

Women are 68% of those who depend on someone else for their right to stay in the UK and so many migrant women cannot risk leaving an abusive relationship because their visas are tied to their partners. This ‘institutionalised dependence’ forged by immigration system rules is used as a tool of control by perpetrators.

The Covid-19 crisis has highlighted many pre-existing problems in the UK: the underfunding of public services, a social security system that doesn’t help people when they need it most, the insecure working and pay conditions of many of our most essential workers. The problems with the rules of the current immigration system have never been starker.

We have seen how dependent our NHS, social care services, agriculture, food production and distribution are on the labour of migrant workers. We have seen tweets from migrant doctors treating Covid-19 patients, worried that if they contract the disease and die their families will have no right to remain in the UK. And we have seen MPs recognise that many of the people who would be excluded under the Government’s proposed new immigration rules are actually key workers: supermarket cashiers, care workers, and hospital cleaners, and how bad their pay and working conditions are.

We hope that when the crisis is over we can do things differently, based on values of care, community and mutual solidarity.

For an analysis of the economic challenges different groups of migrant women face see our report: Migrant Women and the Economy.

For a comprehensive analysis of the impact of Covid-19 on women’s economic position see our report: Crises Collide: Women and Covid-19.