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Writer's pictureProspera Institute
Jul 22, 20244 min read

Selective solidarity

Venezuelan immigrants in their return to Venezuela in the Colombia Frontier. April of 2020. Photo from El Espectador.


Written By: Natalia Acevedo Guerrero

Originally published May 18th, 2020


During the last three months the word solidarity has been trending on presidential discourses around the world, the media, twitter messages, global funds and crowdfunding campaigns. Solidarity has been the frame through which Governments, activists and NGOs have mobilized messages of cooperation and aid during the current COVID-19 pandemic. On April 16 of 2019, the General Assembly of the United Nations enacted the “Declaration of solidarity in the face of the challenges posed by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)”, in which they declare solidarity with the most affected countries and people.[1] In other cases, the term solidarity has been used analogously to charity in order to mobilize food campaigns and few have bothered to give it meaning. Then, it is important to understand the implications of solidarity and ask why, in some cases, solidarity efforts tend to be selective and leave certain people out.  


Sociologist Barbara Prainsack defines solidarity as a "shared practice" that collectively distributes the financial, social and emotional costs in a given context.[2] For Carol Gould, philosopher and director of the Center for Global Ethics and Policy of CUNY University, solidarity cannot be limited to a feeling of collective cooperation between compatriots or between nations, but it forces us to think and challenge structural injustices. Then, solidarity as a practice is intrinsically related to justice and it requires the analysis of inequalities and persistent forms of exploitation.[3] Furthermore, to speak of solidarity it is crucial to think about the importance of people’s interdependence.[4] For Angus Dawson and Bruce Jennings solidarity is an essential principle of public health bioethics, as it explains the intrinsic inter-relational and social features of human beings, which are foundational for ethical conduct.[5] The authors argue that “Solidarity allows us to see that your condition is actually inextricably related to my condition. This is not merely because your condition might be a threat to me (due, for example, to contagion) but because our health states are interdependent in a far richer way. The culture and society within which we live influences, shapes and controls the determinants of health to a degree to which it makes no sense to begin an analysis of health with individuals, with ‘you’ and ‘me’. We should start with us.”[6]


Then, thinking about solidarity requires us to consider the ones that look like us and the ones that are different from us. However, public health responses to the current pandemic have not always considered immigrants, especially those who are undocumented. This is true in the United States, where even though  immigrants are supplying essential jobs, proving food by working in the fields, restaurants and fabrics and are doing vital work in hospitals and in the streets, they are facing the consequences of informality, do not have access to basic healthcare attention and are excluded from most of the federal financial relief aid.[7]  Other 37,000 immigrants and asylum seekers are forced to survive this pandemic in detention centers, where sanitary measures have not been satisfied and social distance is an ontological impossibility.[8]  This has been reflected in the statistics, where Latinx communities, who represent a high number of immigrants, are “being infected and hospitalized at up to three times the rate of white Americans”[9]. In New York City Latinx´s deaths have reported to be 1.6 times the rate that white people deceases.[10]


The United States is not the only place where immigrants are experiencing the worst face of the pandemic. In Colombia and other Latin American countries, millions of Venezuelan immigrants have been affected by current quarantine and lock down measures. This has worsened the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the frontier, leaving many immigrants without surviving options and forcing many to return to their home country.[11]  The now naturalized image of Venezuelans “walkers” in the roads of Colombia is now a symbol of their desperate return. Even if during the last years the Colombian government has guaranteed some basic attention for the almost 1,4 million Venezuelans living in Colombia, their healthcare attention is highly restricted to vital emergencies and xenophobic and discriminatory attitudes are highly common. Currently, there is no desegregated data about the health impact that the pandemic is having on immigrants, who have also been facing higher rates of malnutrition, HIV, maternal and infant mortality and vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks due to the absence of public health measures in their home country over the last years.[12]


In this context, talking about solidarity requires us to reflect around the preexisting social inequities and the way in which the COVID 2019 pandemic has magnified injustices. It also forces us to see the ways in which we are connected with the “others”, the immigrants, the non-citizens, the undocumented, the non-visible workers. Without thinking about them, there is no complete or ethical public health measure and there is no solidarity.


*Natalia is a lawyer from Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. Master in Laws (LLM) from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Candidate of the Master in Bioethics at University of Pittsburgh as a Fulbright grantee.


[1] United Nations, “Declaration of solidarity of the United Nations in the face of the challenges posed by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)”, April 16, 2020, https://www.un.org/pga/74/2020/04/17/declaration-of-solidarity-of-the-united-nations-in-the-face-of-the-challenges-posed-by-the-coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19/

[2] Barbara Prainsack and Alena Buyx, “Solidarity in Contemporary Bioethics - Towards A New Approach”, Bioethics 26 No 7(2012):343-350.

[3] Carol C Gould, “Solidarity and the problem of structural injustice in healthcare”, Bioethics 00 (2018): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12474 

[4] Ibid.

[5] Angus Dawson and Bruce Jennings “The Place of Solidarity in Public Health Ethics”, Public Health Reviews, 34 No 1(2012): 65-79. 75

[6] Ibid.,77

[7] Lissandra Villa, “We're Ignored Completely.' Amid the Pandemic, Undocumented Immigrants Are Essential But Exposed”, Time, April 17, 2020, https://time.com/5823491/undocumented-immigrants-essential-coronavirus/

[8] Kate Goldman, “No Masks, Disinfectant or Soap. This Is Detention Amid a Pandemic.”, New York Times, April 2, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/opinion/coronavirus-ice-immigration-detention.html?fbclid=IwAR0RVcsUDDaiX7QUFRfhq0WOEk1rVgMyxdkqpV41Qtz9bP9Ar9Dc7n8bZOo

[9] Maanvi Singh and Mario Koran, “'The virus doesn't discriminate but governments do': Latinos disproportionately hit by coronavirus”, The Guardian, April 18, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/18/the-virus-doesnt-discriminate-but-governments-do-latinos-disproportionately-hit-by-coronavirus

[10] Ibid.

[12] Human Rights Watch, “Venezuela: Numbers Highlight Health Crisis Disease Outbreaks; Lives at Risk”, November 15, 2018, https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/11/15/venezuela-numbers-highlight-health-crisis

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