Covid-19, Migration, and Racism in Australia: Key Challenges and Research Directions

KEYWORDS:

• Covid-19
• Australia
• racism
• migration
• policy
• research
• practice

Introduction

The unique and complex social, health, and economic challenges arising from the SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic have been subject to extensive discussion and deliberation in global scholarship and policy. In Australia, the adverse impacts of the pandemic have been especially pronounced for migrant, refugee, and multicultural communities; many of whom – pandemic or no pandemic – face substantial barriers to accessing essential health, economic and social resources, such as affordable health care, clear and culturally appropriate communication, and opportunities for social connection. For many people in these communities, access to these fundamental supports declined considerably during Covid-19 (Doherty 2020), while burgeoning levels of racism (including race-based discrimination and racialised violence) were reported across the country; particularly in the early stages of the pandemic (Elias et al. 2021, Kamp et al. 2022). The resulting social, health, and economic consequences are well documented in the Australian literature (Doery et al. 2023, Grant et al. 2023, Kamp et al. 2022). Furthermore, both local and global investigations of racism during previous major health crises offer compelling evidence of long-term impacts (Schlabach 2019, Shah 2001, Wenham et al. 2009); highlighting a pressing need to understand (and document) the ramifications of these issues beyond the Covid-19 context.

This special issue, entitled ‘Covid-19, Migration, and Racism in Australia: Key Challenges and Research Directions’, brings together interdisciplinary scholarly perspectives and original research surrounding the unique challenges that people from culturally and ethnically diverse backgrounds faced during the Covid-19 pandemic in Australia. On this topic, we have collated ten research articles emphasising ongoing implications and important future considerations for researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and communities alike. In this introduction, we provide a general overview of the special issue, including summaries of the ten featured papers and their key findings/arguments. We begin, however, with a broad summary of known issues impacting multicultural communities in Australia during the Covid-19 pandemic, taking care to situate these in their historical, intercultural contexts.

Background: Notable Challenges Facing Multicultural Communities During Covid-19

In March 2020, when Covid-19 was officially declared a global pandemic, Australian federal and state government bodies attempted to mitigate viral transmission by introducing strict protocols. These included social distancing restrictions, masking requirements, and nationwide lockdowns. During this time, we saw the emergence of media and social commentary pieces describing Covid-19 as a ‘great equalizer’ that would essentially abrogate longstanding socioeconomic disparities across the globe (Gravlee 2020). In reality, however, the pandemic’s harms were not experienced homogenously. Investigations into the social impacts of global health crises have long demonstrated how pandemics follow society’s ‘fault lines’ (Wade 2020, p. 703). In other words, events such as Covid-19 deepen (rather than nullify) existing inequities. We saw this at play during the pandemic in Australia, with autocratic policies, norms, and ideologies working to further marginalise the country’s most disadvantaged individuals and groups (Kiwan 2020), for instance, via the exclusion of temporary visa holders from accessing government Covid-19 stimulus packages (Doherty 2020). Given the plethora of evidence that racial minorities in Australia experienced increased rates of economic hardship during the height of the pandemic – alongside social isolation and psychological distress (Biddle et al. 2020, Kamp et al. 2022) – these kinds of exclusionary policies are especially concerning (also see Phillips, this issue).

A paradoxical aspect of any major health crisis is how the very policies designed to protect communities (e.g. by minimising the spread of infection) can diminish health outcomes in other ways. Vital connections between individuals and their communities, for instance, were vastly disrupted by prolonged Covid-19 lockdowns across Australia, which required us to collectively reimagine how we participate in community activities and access vital social supports. In turn, mediated communication (largely via digital networks) offered crucial opportunities for connection during a time where in-person options were either drastically limited or non-existent (Cabalquinto and Ahlin 2021). But for people without reliable access to digital networks and/or the required technological competencies to engage with these, social isolation was heightened, with notable health and mental health implications (Sidani et al. 2022, Thomas et al. 2020).

In addition to their capacity to help foster social connection during a pandemic, communication and digital networks also play a vital role in informing publics about the crisis; for example, through the provision of important updates surrounding government directives, available services and supports, and available preventative measures (see Young et al., this issue). To make informed decisions regarding our safety (and that of our familial and social networks) in a crisis, all communities must be able to promptly access essential information. Despite the affordances of digital technologies in recent years, however, problems persist with respect to equitable access, trust, reliability, and reach of crisis communication and public health messaging. For instance, we saw an over-abundance of messages infiltrate the public sphere during the early stages of Covid-19, reflecting a phenomenon labelled by the World Health Organization as an ‘infodemic’ (WHO 2020). And for marginalised communities, the ‘infodemic’ nature of the pandemic was widely reported to impede access to reliable, trustworthy, and accurate information about the crisis (Czapka et al. 2023, Healey et al. 2022, Jayan and Dutta 2021, Mamalipurath and Notley 2022, Wild et al. 2021). Additionally, confusing, inaccessible, and/or inappropriate messaging is well known to reduce communities’ collective capacity to follow public health directives. Indeed, nonsensical and/or poorly translated public health messaging was found to contribute to people unwittingly spreading the Covid-19 virus (Bogle 2020). Consequently, already vulnerable communities were more inclined to catch and spread the virus, while facing additional barriers to accessing essential supports (Ortega et al. 2020).

Alongside the issue of information inaccessibility, we must also grapple with the growing problem of information reliability during crisis events, which is severely compromised by both unintentional misinformation and intentional disinformation (for simplicity, both concepts are hereafter referred to as ‘mis/disinformation’). Multicultural populations are especially vulnerable to the harmful effects of mis/disinformation, often due to language and/or cultural barriers and distrust of formal institutions arising from experiences of persecution and trauma (Abba-Aji et al. 2022). Furthermore, prior research has shown that these communities are disproportionately targeted in media rhetoric (including social media discourse) that scapegoats racial minorities for various social, health, and economic problems facing society (Haw 2023, Sutherland and Dykstra-DeVette 2018). Worldwide, Covid-related mis/disinformation was weaponised to discriminate against certain minority groups (Cover et al. 2022, Mamalipurath and Notley 2022; see also Sengul in this issue), further illustrating the disruptive potential of mis/disinformation to ignite a sense of panic and division that gives rise to racism and xenophobia. Covid-related conspiracy theories, for example, routinely contained a racial element, including claims that the virus was bioengineered in a Wuhan lab, that it was created by the Chinese government to facilitate the roll-out of 5G mobile technology, and that Melbourne’s second wave of infections was caused by Muslims celebrating Ramadan (Bruns et al. 2020, Halafoff et al. 2022).

This kind of rhetoric can embolden and mobilise nefarious, far-right movements (and actors) by capitalising on pre-existing anxieties about the ‘other’ that, in turn, work to legitimise racist and exclusionary discourses and policies (Cover, et al. 2022). The Covid-19 Wuhan lab conspiracy theory, for instance, reflects longstanding anti-Asian prejudice in many western countries with long histories of racism, discrimination, and violence (Wu et al. 2021). In the wake of these claims, many multicultural communities and individuals (notably those from Asian backgrounds) were subjected to both physical and verbal harassment; both in-person and online (Abidin and Zeng 2020, Ang and Mansouri 2023, Elias et al. 2021, Kamp et al. 2022; Kamp et al. this issue). Racism of this nature has long been observed to have profound consequences for the social, physical, and emotional wellbeing of those targeted (Carson et al. 2020, Paradies et al. 2015), reflecting what Elias and colleagues (2021) call ‘the multidimensional nature of racism’ (Elias et al. 2021, p. 784). The preponderance of racism during Covid-19, for example, was found to contribute to vaccine hesitancy and diminished access to urgent health supports; a problem further compounded by widespread distrust of formal institutions among multicultural communities (Liddell et al. 2021; see also Haw and Hauw in this issue).

In efforts to address Covid-related racism in the Australian context, it is vital to interrogate the social history of white Australians’ interrelations with people of colour; a practice that can help us better understand the maintenance of major resource inequalities that both underlie and reinforce racial oppression, violence, and exclusion (Feagin and Elias 2013, Hage 2012). The problem of racism in Australia (including both overt and structural forms of racialised exclusion and hostility) is not a new phenomenon. The issues we have seen during Covid-19 both reflect and perpetuate anxieties observed across the country since Federation, whereby the so-called ‘yellow peril’ was constructed as a threat to the newly established ‘white’ colony (Walker 1999). But despite the abolishment of the White Australia Policy in 1973 – and Australia’s growing population diversity in the years since – the perception of Australia as a white nation under threat from the undesirable ‘other’ persists (Elias et al. 2021, Nolan et al. 2018). For instance, Australia’s decades of exclusionary asylum seeker policies are deeply rooted in a longstanding, colonial rhetoric of white supremacy. Here, non-white migrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking populations are framed as unwanted (and ungrateful) ‘invaders’, ‘criminals’, ‘freeloaders’, and ‘disease carriers’ who seek to take advantage of the generosity of ‘hard-working’ Australians (Clark et al. 2024, Haw et al. 2020, Every and Augoustinos 2008, Martin 2023). As Mbembe (2019) highlights, such rhetoric – which has deeply underscored racist sentiments in the Covid-19 context – reflects racism and colonialism working together to uphold ideologies that position whiteness as the default signifier of citizenship and belonging.

When we consider this historical context, we can begin to understand the Covid-19 pandemic as merely one contemporary example of how crisis events illuminate (and deepen) the ‘fault lines’ of society (Wade 2020, p. 703). Even in a so-called ‘post-Covid-19’ era (Asif et al. 2022), scholarly, policy, and practice insights collectively tell us that the ensuing social and health divides for racially marginalised members of society will be vast and ongoing. Efforts to better understand how the pandemic has impacted Australia’s ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse communities are therefore urgent.

To begin to respond to this challenge, we have curated ten articles discussing the myriad of issues that have faced multicultural communities during the Covid-19 pandemic in Australia, focusing on what we can learn from the pandemic to ensure more equitable policy and practice responses to ongoing and future crisis events. These articles are authored by scholars working across a broad range of disciplines – including Sociology, Social Policy, Geography, Asian Studies, Media and Communication, Community Development, Public Health, and Urban Studies – with their contributions paving the way for fruitful research agendas for others working within (and across) these important fields of inquiry. The special issue is structured in three parts. The articles in Part 1 map out the scope and impact of Covid-related racism in the Australian context, including dominant ideologies in political, societal, and mediated discourse. In Part 2, we feature articles that document multicultural communities’ experiences of racism during the pandemic, illuminating important research and practice recommendations informed by embodied expertise. Finally, the articles in Part 3 focus on responses enacted by communities and those who support them, both during and following the pandemic in Australia, emphasising key policy and practice implications.

Contents of Covid-19, Migration, and Racism in Australia

Part I: Setting the Scene – The Form and Scope of Covid-related Racism in Australia

We start setting the scene with Jehonathan Ben and Amanuel Elias’s overview of pandemic racism in Australia: ‘Pandemic racism in Australia: a systematic review’. Ben and Elias reviewed Australian – and pandemic-specific – racism research published between January 2020 and July 2022. They explored the forms of racism associated with the pandemic in Australia, the effects of this racism on socio-economic and health outcomes, and, more generally, whether the prevalence of racism changed during the pandemic.

Ben and Elias found that both interpersonal racism (e.g. overt vilification and attacks; Othering) and structural racism (e.g. labour market discrimination; more severe lockdowns of migrant buildings/communities) were associated with the pandemic. They also found that there were health and socio-economic disparities associated with the pandemic, particularly for Asian Australians. Further, victims of racism were unlikely to report it. The findings on the prevalence of racism indicate that it was lower during the pandemic, probably due to the lockdowns, which meant there were fewer opportunities for racist behaviour. Ben and Elias also note that the data collected in Australia around racism is limited, making it challenging to understand the types and extents of racism occurring there. They call for improved data around measuring racism and its effects in Australia.

Kurt Sengul’s article – ‘The (re)surgence of Sinophobia in the Australian far-right: online racism, social media, and the weaponization of Covid-19’ – examines the role of Australian far-right actors in the discursive racialisation of the pandemic. Drawing on the Discourse Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, Sengul presents an analysis of Facebook posts from Australian far-right political party, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (PHON). His findings demonstrate how, in the first 12 months of the crisis, PHON engaged in a sustained social media campaign to demonise and Other Chinese Australians using a range of discursive strategies, linguistic devices, and multimodal semiotic practices. Analysed with careful consideration of Australia’s well documented history of fear, derision, and discomfort toward people of Asian descent (all of which have deep roots in the country’ settler colonial past and present), Sengul’s paper illustrates how these longstanding anxieties and hostilities were reflected in PHON’s ubiquitous scapegoating of China and Chinese Australians during the pandemic, offering a compelling case study to help us understand how far-right populist parties instrumentalise crisis events to scapegoat ethnic and racial minority groups to serve their own political agenda.

Monica Tan and Yu Tao’s article, entitled ‘Covid-19, perceived foreign interference, and Anti-Chinese Sentiment: evidence from concurrent survey experiments in Australia and the United States’, examines anti-Chinese sentiment in the West during the Covid-19 pandemic, offering a comparative analysis between Australia and the United States (US). Tan and Tao examined whether (and to what extent) information regarding the Chinese government’s handling of Covid-19 and its alleged foreign interference operations instigated anti-Chinese sentiments in Australia and the US during the height of the pandemic.

Tan and Tao report that, in both countries, there was a positive correlation between decreased trust in people of Chinese heritage and exposure to messages asserting that the Chinese government was working to influence the behaviours of Chinese diaspora communities. The Australian sample, however, expressed greater concerns than their US counterparts regarding the Chinese government’s alleged influence over Chinese diaspora communities. In turn, the authors argue that more in-depth understandings of the impacts of both mediated discourse and antiracist social movements may help foster improved understandings of the conditions for meaningful inclusivity in multicultural societies.

Part II: Experiences of Covid-related Racism in Australia – Impacts and Implications

Part II moves to analyses of experiences of Covid-related racism in Australia. The first article – Alanna Kamp, Rachel Sharples, Matteo Vergani and Nida Denson’s ‘Asian Australian’s experiences and reporting of racism during the COVID-19 pandemic’ – analyses Asian Australians’ experiences racism during the pandemic, using survey data collected between November 2020 and February 2021. Kamp and colleagues were concerned with understanding the type and frequency of racism experienced, whether respondents reported racism, and what the barriers were to reporting. They found that 40 per cent of participants had experienced pandemic-related racism, which, while very high, was actually lower than pre-pandemic levels, and 39 per cent had witnessed it. Interestingly, more Australian born participants reported experiencing racism than migrants. The authors posit that this may be due to higher levels of racial literacy amongst the Australian born. Kamp et al. also found that racism was rarely reported, and the reasons why included a lack of knowledge of how to make a report; a lack of trust in statutory authorities; a belief that nothing would be done if a report was made; and feelings of hopelessness, shame and/or disempowerment. These barriers to reporting worked to prevent victims of racism from reporting it. They argue that this lack of reporting means that the extent and impact of racism are masked.

Some of these findings about reporting racism are further unpacked by Mario Peucker, Tom Clark and Holly Claridge. In their paper, ‘Mapping the journey of (non-) reporting in response to racism: a change-oriented approach to reporting barriers, motives and support needs’, Peucker et al. also tackle the complex issue of reporting racism. They do this by critically examining some key factors for why a person may opt to report (or not report) their experiences. In light of increased calls for improved empirical evidence surrounding reporting barriers, Peucker and colleagues point out a notable knowledge gap in terms of our collective understanding of what drives both reporting and non-reporting decisions for people who have experienced racism. Utilising data from surveys and focus group discussion with people who self-identify as culturally, ethnically, or religiously diverse – collected in Melbourne, Australia from 2020 to 2022 – this article presents an analysis of local community perspectives in relation to reporting pathways and support services. In doing so, the authors provide important empirical insights into the interplay between personal experiences, motives, and support needs, alongside some of the systemic factors that impact a person’s reporting (or not reporting) experiences in the face of racism. Peucker and colleagues conclude by stating that effective anti-racism initiatives must be grounded in the knowledge of a broad range of stakeholders who share a commitment to work jointly towards positive change, whilst centring the expertise of those with lived experience of racism.

The last paper in part II is by Ashleigh Haw and Samantha Hauw. In ‘The health and social implications of racism during Covid-19: insights from Melbourne’s multicultural communities’ Haw and Hauw draw on qualitative research with community leaders and service providers who supported multicultural communities during the pandemic to explore the social and health implications of the pandemic in Melbourne. Using Systemic Racism theory, Haw and Hauw unpack how pandemic racism affected the wellbeing of migrant communities. They found that fear of pandemic racism prevented community members from accessing healthcare (including vaccinations) and from going out in public or engaging with family and friends, contributing to social isolation. Further, they asked participants what they thought might help to address pandemic-related racism. Culturally sensitive communication, increased representation of people with lived experience of racism in decision-making roles and media organisations, increased funding to support services and advocacy groups, and collaborative approaches that involve multicultural communities were noted as ways forward. Haw and Hauw’s research supports previous findings that indicate systemic racism is a determinant of health. They argue that while it is critical to centre marginalised communities in antiracism work, it is essential that such work is properly resourced.

Part III: Moving Forward – Responses, Supports, and Policy Directions

The final section of this special issue features a selection of articles focused on responses to the problems multicultural populations in Australia have faced during (and beyond) the Covid-19 pandemic. The first two contributions focus on older migrants, a relatively understudied group. Earvin Cabalquinto’s article – ‘Enclaved belonging: ageing migrants staying connected by consuming Covid-19 information’ – explores the practices and strategies enacted by ageing migrants to remain connected with their local and international social and familial networks, by accessing and consuming both traditional and digital media information about the pandemic. To situate his analysis, Cabalquinto draws on the concepts of ‘digital belonging’ Marlowe et al. (2017) and ‘digital kinning’ (Baldassar and Wilding 2019, Baldassar et al. 2020) to understand and articulate the important role of digital technologies in fostering a sense of belonging and safety among ageing migrants during Covid-19. Here, he describes how the practice of both consuming and circulating Covid-related information enabled ageing migrants in Victoria to feel more informed (and use this information to make decisions about how to protect themselves and their loved ones from the virus), while forging (and maintaining) social and familial connections.

Cabalquinto also interrogates how mediated belonging is ultimately shaped by everyday processes of differentiation and racialisation (Colic-Peisker and Farquharson 2011); both of which have long been observed to deepen exclusion for migrant communities (Ang 2011, Harris 2010). Ultimately, Cabalquinto’s findings highlight how close-knit and intergenerational ties shape ageing migrants’ experiences navigating mediated information in a crisis; illuminating the vital role of clear, accessible, and culturally informed communication in building a sense of safety, social connection, and belonging.

In ‘Scaling the ageing migrant body in the digital era: a case of older Chinese migrants in Australia during the Covid-19 pandemic’, Wilfred Yang Wang draws on the concept of ‘geographical scale’ (Smith 1982), to examine the integral role of digital media engagement in creating a sense of self and belonging among ageing Chinese migrants during Covid-19 in Melbourne, Australia. Wang examines the interplay between digital communication and the ageing migrant body, discussing participants’ imagination of their bodies across different spatial scales; noting how, while scales functioned to confine and restrict their physical movements during the 2020–2021 lockdowns, the affordances of digital technologies enabled them to imagine their bodies beyond the immediate geographical (and physical) context. Wang encourages readers to consider the important role of digital communication in providing avenues for ageing migrant communities in Australia to navigate, negotiate with, and reimagine their sense of self and belonging in the face of what was otherwise a highly isolating period.

While Wang looks at digital communication and older adults, Charlotte Young, Rob Cover, Lukas Parker, and Katia Ostapets focus on the use of digital communication for Covid-19 health communication. In their article – ‘Conveying COVID-19 health information with CALD social media influencers: the cultural role of brand consistency and relatability for identity authenticity’ – Young and colleagues posit that cultural media influencers might be able to effectively communicate health information to culturally and linguistically diverse young people, but that this effectiveness may be shaped by how authentic audiences perceive the influencers to be. Their study provides novel insights into how governments might improve health communication to underserved communities through digital media.

Our final contribution, Melissa Phillips’ ‘It's time to make your way home: implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for multicultural policies in Australia’, provides a critical analysis of how that Australian government responded to the pandemic. Phillips shows how the pandemic highlighted the shallowness of Australia’s multicultural policies, which were effectively put on hold during the pandemic, particularly regarding temporary migrants. In using the analogy of a fig leaf, she argues that the exclusion of temporary migrants from support during the pandemic situated them as second-class residents who were strongly encouraged to go home, or to live off their savings, raising questions about equity principles and about Australia’s purported commitment to multiculturalism.

Conclusion

The Covid-19 pandemic brought unique and complex challenges to multicultural communities in Australia. The articles in this special issue provide important insights about these challenges, including their scope and impact at the community and societal levels, and through mediated discourse. This research indicates that multicultural communities experienced particular forms of racism during the pandemic and responded to it in various ways. It also highlights the gaps in Australia’s multicultural policy approach that worked to foster some forms of racism.

Acknowledgements

This special issue came about through a symposium on Covid-19 and racism at the University of Melbourne in 2022 that was convened by the editors alongside Associate Professor Val Colic-Peisker. We thank Val for her contribution to the symposium as well as all participants. We also thank the School of Social and Political Sciences for its financial support and Renee Delahunty for her administrative and logistical support of the symposium. Finally, we thank the contributors to this special issue and Paula Muraca and Vince Marotta from the Journal of Intercultural Studies for their support in making the special issue happen.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).