News Americas, FORT LAUDERDALE, FL, Fri. April 17, 2020: On the strangest Good Friday in my lifetime, with no actual church to attend, I felt moved by the spirit to listen to Bob Marley’s ‘War’ again, after the lyrics popped into my head.
“War in the east
War in the west
War up north
War down south
War war.”
The lyrics are as pertinent today as when Marley penned them in 1976, more than a decade after Haile Selassie spoke those same words at the UN in 1963.
You May Like: The Caribbean Immigrant Victims Of COVID-19
Except, there is a new war being fought in America and around the world against not a physical enemy but an unseen virus – COVID-19. And again, as they do in the US military, immigrants are again on the frontlines of this new war.
They are the new soldiers in their respective fields – the cops and fire fighters, the paramedics and ambulance/ambulette drivers, the staff in hospitals and nursing homes, the nurses and doctors, the MTA workers, the airport and other security officers, the grocery store workers, the restaurant workers, the maintenance workers, the warehouse workers, the delivery staffers and more.
And as with any war, many are dying and becoming the new unseen martyrs on this new domestic battlefield, as they lack proper equipment to battle this new enemy. While it is not yet known how many immigrants in the medical or essential fields have died so far, the initial data is shocking.
In New York City alone, Hispanic immigrants now make up 34 percent of the city’s deaths from COVID-19, compared with 29 percent of the population, according to the new data published by Politico. Neighborhood data from city officials, also show that Corona, Queens, home to a large percentage of Latin American immigrants, now has the most coronavirus cases of any area in the city, with 1,659. That’s those who have been tested!
Blacks now comprise 28 percent of deaths from COVID-19 in NYC, compared with 22 percent of the population. But it is unknown how many are immigrants from the Caribbean or African as the data did not deep dive into nationality.
Of the fatalities known so far from this study, 521 of the dead are Latinos, 428 blacks, 424 whites and 112 Asians.
From what News Americas has been able to cull to date, over 50 Caribbean immigrants have passed away from the virus in New York City alone in the past few weeks.
They include medical frontline immigrant soldiers like Haitian immigrant, Dr. Ronald Verrier, a trauma critical care surgeon practicing in the Bronx, NY; Trinidadian immigrant Sieunarine Ramnarine, an employee at DJ Ambulette Service in the Bronx; Guyanese immigrants Prea Nankieshore, 34, a former clerk who registered patients in the emergency room at Long Island Jewish Forest Hills hospital in NYC, and Oliver Cyrus, 61, a MTA bus operator for 21 years, who lived in Brooklyn, NY.
As some may know, many of the more than 150 million health care sector workers in America, immigrants made up nearly 26 million, or 17 percent, according to a 2017 Migration Policy Institute study. Of those specialties, 28 percent of physicians and surgeons were immigrants, and 24 percent were nursing, psychiatric and home health aides.
Yet, many more immigrant medical and emergency workers with no green cards, are working 37-hour shifts to help save lives in a country they embrace as their home. They are the DREAMERS who face deportation under the Donald Trump regime if the pro-right Supreme Court agrees with El Trumpeto.
Aldo Martinez, a paramedic and a DREAMER in Fort Myers, is among those fighting on the new frontlines despite living in limbo because of the Trump Administration’s 2017 decision to end DACA, or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The program has allowed DREAMERS like Martinez to go to college, work legally and now put their lives on the line to help fight this war.
In all of this, what has Donald Trump done? Flapped his gums daily about nothing that matters while the death rate skyrockets and his administration calmly continues to deport immigrants while keeping tens of thousands more in crowed detention centers despite the risk of infection.
Who cares about immigrants and who cares about these new immigrant soldiers? Like the immigrant soldiers in the military, they are so easily dispensable in the eyes of an administration that undoubtedly holds one race superior over another.
After all, as Selassie stated and Marley sang, the:
“Rule of international morality
Will remain but a fleeting illusion to be pursued,
But never attained
Now everywhere is war
War.”
Sing with me:
“Everywhere is war
Me say war!”
The writer is publisher of NewsAmericasNow
