Students and staff surveyed roughly 200 refugees from Bosnia, Myanmar, and Somalia living in Utica at the beginning and end of the pandemic, asking them about their finances, employment, housing, education, and overall health.
Sociology Professor Stephen Ellingson says housing became the biggest burden on refugee communities at this time. He says 72 percent of respondents reported spending more than 70 percent of their income on housing back in 2020 – and those numbers didn’t change in 2024.
“Compared to the rest of the U.S., refugees are spending a lot of their income on housing," says Ellingson.
The report comes after President Trump paused the country’s refugee resettlement program. A coalition of refugee organizations has reportedly sued over the freeze.
Ellingson and his co-authors, including Economics Professor Erol Balkan, say the goal of their survey was to look at some of the broader impacts of COVID-19 on vulnerable communities. The report finds more than one-third of respondents lost their jobs during the pandemic, and more than half saw their work hours reduced. Although employment has rebounded since then, Balkan says a lot of these families are now playing catchup — and battling inflation and housing costs in the process.
“You can imagine if your income is going down, your other expenditures are going up — and the housing one is a big one — it creates a huge impact on these communities," he adds.
Balkan says more than 70 percent of the refugees they surveyed tested positive for COVID at some point during the pandemic, and a majority reported their overall health and emotional wellbeing declined during this period. Respondents often listed financial concerns, poor transportation access, fear that they could catch COVID, and language barriers as reasons why they didn’t receive care.
That said, Ellingson says vaccine hesitancy persisted through the pandemic. According to the survey, more than 30 percent of respondents don’t plan to get vaccines and boosters going forward.
“Remember, a lot of the refugees are fleeing political oppression,' Ellingson explains. "So, trusting the state or institutional authorities might not be high on their list. That was one of the things we noticed, the resistance to public health issues.”
Not all refugee communities were impacted equally. Balkan says Bosnian refugees, most of whom had lived in Utica longer, fared better in terms of housing and employment. Somali refugees, meanwhile, were more likely to report job losses, housing instability, and health concerns.
“The newcomers, or at least, groups that came in the last five to 10 years, have a lot of challenges," says Balkan. "They don't know how to apply for a loan. The financial literacy is very, very important, and without the language proficiency, it becomes very difficult."
The report lists several recommendations going forward, including support for financial literacy programs, job initiatives, housing assistance, vaccination campaigns, and culturally sensitive counseling at local nonprofits. Overall, Ellingson says he hopes the report puts the term “long COVID” in a new light.
“We want to kind of open up that term, and have us think about long COVID in terms of these more enduring impacts on community health," says Ellingson.
An outlier Ellingson wants to look into: in 2020, more than 60 percent of refugees felt their children’s education was suffering from the pandemic, but by 2024 that number shrunk to less than a quarter. Ellingson says those responses don’t fit with nationwide testing data since 2020. He’d like to see if parents are simply unaware of any learning deficits — or if there’s something Utica schools are doing right.
