Transnational Students Facing Multiple Crises: Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Oaxaca, Mexico

Transnational Students Facing Multiple Crises: Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Oaxaca, Mexico Marta Rodríguez-Cruz Institute for Anthropological Research-UNAM, Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico University of Seville. Doctors Talent Program (PAIDI 2020, European Social Fund - Junta de Andalucía) Abstract This article analyzes the impact of multiple crises —economic, educational, and health —generated by the COVID-19 pandemic among transnational students in Oaxaca, Mexico. The article explores the period between April 2020 and March 2021, the most critical moment of the pandemic in the United States and Mexico. Due to the impact of the pandemic on traditional fieldwork, we developed a qualitative, ethnographic, and virtual methodology. Specifically, we used semi-structured interviews conducted via Meet and telephone and virtual participant observations in online teaching platforms and WhatsApp groups. The main findings of the study reveal that students from transnational families faced three major intertwined crises —economic, educational, and health —from numerous places of differential vulnerability related to forced transnationalism, as generated by the illegality of undocumented Mexican migrants in the United States and their subsequent deportation. Keywords transnational students, deportation, pandemic, crisis, United States, Mexico Corresponding Author: Marta Rodríguez-Cruz, Institute for Anthropological Research - UNAM; Department of Social Antrhopology, University of Seville. Doctors Talent Program (PAIDI 2020, European Social Fund - Junta de Andalucía). Email: [email protected] Migrants and the COVID-19 Pandemic International Migration Review 2024, Vol. 58(2) 522-544 © The Author(s) 2023 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/01979183231170791 journals.sagepub.com/home/mrx Introduction Migratory movements in Latin America have increased in recent years due to the intensification of globalization processes, multiple economic and political crises, and increased border security. These factors have diversified types of mobilities, including increases in and redirections of flows and increases in voluntary and forced returns (Herrera and Nyberg 2017, 13–14). In the case of the United States (US) and Mexico, the direction of migratory flows between these countries has reversed in recent years due to the 2008 financial crisis and the restrictive migration policies implemented by various US presidential administrations (Gandini and Aranzalez 2019; Rivera 2019; Carrillo and Román 2021). The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) during the Clinton administration (1993–2001) and the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) following the 9/11 attacks during the Bush administration (2001–2009) laid the groundwork for greater surveillance and control of undocumented immigration. This peaked during the Obama administration (2009–2017) with the Secure Community Program and the Priority Enforcement Program. During the Bush administration, 1.5 million Mexicans were deported, and two million were deported during the Obama administration (Department of Homeland Security 2017). The Trump administration (2017–2021) must be understood within this historical context of immigration expulsion (Álvarez 2017). During his administration, Trump gave directives to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to hire thousands of agents and expand priority immigrant groups for removal, as well as to expedite arrests and hearings that resulted in a dramatic increase in deportations, including those of migrants without criminal records (Nakamura 2017). During the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump also implemented Title 42, an exceptional measure that crippled the US reception system for two years and triggered express deportations under the pretext of containing contagion to maintain public health (American Immigration Council n.d.). Between March and July 2020 alone, the US government deported almost 40,000 Mexicans (Ortega 2020). With these measures, the Trump administration promoted the return of thousands of Mexicans to their country of origin, continuing the forced return policy of the Great Expulsion (2005–present), following the Great Migration (1986–2005) (Hernández-León and Zúñiga 2016). Located in southwestern México, Oaxaca is home to 3.3 percent of the country’s population and a source of 9 percent of its emigrants (Consejo Nacional de Población y Vivienda [CONAPO] 2019). It has been one of the Mexican states most affected by Trump’s immigration policies. Data from the Migration Policy Unit (2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021) indicate an increase in the number of deportations; out of a total of 779,731 Mexicans deported, 69,835 were Oaxacans. In May 2020, when the United States had the highest number of Rodríguez-Cruz 523 COVID-19 infections and deaths worldwide, more than 4,000 Oaxacan migrants were deported (Cruz 2020). Before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, under Trump, migrants have returned to Mexico accompanied by their minor children, some of whom were born in the United States and some in Mexico. This diaspora is notable for the high presence of children and adolescents. In 2017, Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI, its acronym in Spanish) registered more than 500,000 US-born children and adolescents in Mexico and more than 60,000 Mexican-born children and adolescents with prior US residence. More recent figures pointed to more than 900,000 children and adolescents in Mexico from the United States (Barros 2019). According to the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants (OIAM), more than 1,000 children and adolescents entered Oaxaca from the United States in 2018, the same number as recorded in 2019 (personal communication, December 18, 2020). All these figures show an increasing mobility of children and adolescents, thus highlighting the “growing heterogeneity of flows and the need to rethink the conceptual categories through which migration is addressed” (Herrera and Nyberg 2017, 13–14). The subjects of this study are children and adolescents who comprise the so-called Generation 0.5 (Zúñiga and Giorguli 2019) —international migrants living and being educated in Mexico, some of whom are Mexicans raised in the United States and some of whom are Americans being educated in Mexico. While not all children and adolescents arrive in Mexico because of parental deportation (Zúñiga and Hamann 2020), the cases addressed involve children and adolescents who arrived in Oaxaca between January 2017 and February 2020 and belong to transnational families separated by deportation: one parent was deported as undocumented and moved to Oaxaca with the offspring, while the other remained in the United States to send remittances. In Latin America, school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted more than 165 million students (Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe [CEPAL]-Naciones Unidas [NU] 2020, 1), 37,589,611 of them in Mexico (Naciones Unidas-México 2020). According to INEGI, the pandemic forced 2.3 million students out of the 2020–2021 school cycle; another 2.9 million did not enroll due to a lack of resources, and 3.3 million had to enter the labor market (Migueles and Moreno 2021). Although the consequences of the pandemic have been similar for many students, they have had a more significant impact on populations already living in vulnerable conditions, such as migrants (Ayala et al. 2020; CEPAL-NU 2020; Franzé 2020; Ortega 2020). This is the case of the transnational students in this study, who were already experiencing a precarious educational (re) insertion before the pandemic (Carrillo and Román 2021; Hamann 2021; Kasun and Mora 2021; Tacelosky 2021; Zúñiga and Giorguli 2019) —a situation worsened by the economic and health crises triggered by the pandemic. This study aims to analyze the impact of the multiple crises generated by the COVID-19 pandemic —economic, educational, and health —among transnational 524 International Migration Review 58(2) students in Oaxaca, as students with specific vulnerability factors linked to forced transnationalism. Based on the voices and experiences of these students, this research provides a retrospective analysis of such impacts during the period of April 2020– March 2021, when the most critical moments of the international health emergency occurred in the United States and Mexico. This research thus contributes to studies on transnational migration between the United States and Mexico by analyzing how the pandemic has impacted three fundamental dimensions of the lives of students affected by forced transnationalism: economic, educational, and health. Deportation, Families, and Transnational Students Mass deportations have sparked numerous research studies on the production of illegality, deportability, and forcibly returned migrants (Domenech 2015; Álvarez 2017; Estévez 2018), where deportation is understood as “an increasingly global mechanism of state control”(Herrera and Nyberg 2017, 23). This is intensified in times of migration crises triggered by other crises (economic, political, climate, and health), which, in turn, unleash a crisis of control in migration-receiving countries based on “the production of a spectacle of borders depicted as ‘out of control’and associated with discourses and images of migrant ‘invasions’” (Álvarez 2017, 158). Throughout his administration, one of Trump’s main objectives was to crack down on the “illegality”of Mexican migrants, mainly through deportation. However, as we pointed out earlier, this anti-immigrant reaction must be interpreted within a broader historical context. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) established by Reagan in 1986 included a form of amnesty and precipitated many legalization efforts, but only for immigrants arriving in the United States before 1982; it excluded those who arrived after this year, for whom “the door was closed”(Viladrich-Grau 1998, 61). Later, Clinton (1993–2001) implemented drastic measures against undocumented migration through IIRIRA (1996), and Obama (2009–2017) became the president who carried out the most deportations in US history (Álvarez 2017, 162). Within this trajectory of forced expulsion, one of the main consequences of the deportation of irregular-status Mexican migrants has been the separation and transnational configuration of mixed-status nuclear families, made up of members with and without US citizenship, depending on their place of birth in the United States or Mexico (Barros 2017; Durand 2017). Although migratory movements have always generated transnational families, recent decades have seen transnational families resulting from deportation based on a resurgence of the political apparatus that punishes irregular migrants and is sustained by the discursive and factual production of their illegality and criminality. The fundamental nucleus of transnational families is constituted like that of any traditional family; however, they are differentiated in that they are comprised of members who have lost co-residence as the main element of the family unit and who, although they live in different social and geographical spaces, maintain ties based on kinship (Kline 2016; Durand 2017; Herrera and Nyberg 2017; Urbiola Rodríguez-Cruz 525 2020). In this form of “family across national borders”(Bryceson and Vuorela 2002, 12), families suffer affective, communication, and role restructuring within the nuclear family, determined by the separation of its members —in this case, due to deportation. Scientific research on transnationality has produced concepts such as transnational community (Georges 1990), transnational social field (Levitt and Glick 2004), and transnationalism from above and below (Guarnizo and Smith 1998). In the case of children and adolescents moving between the United States and Mexico, Zúñiga, Hamann, and Sánchez (2008) coined the term “transnational students,”who are the result of economic conjunctures and US migration policies (Ocampo 2016; León 2018). Many parents who are deported choose to take their children with them to Mexico (Kline 2016, 46), which means that transnational students attached to families separated by deportation become the children of long-distance (Ballesteros 2020) or transnational parenting (Nyberg and Vammen 2016). Furthermore, their lives are intersected by a series of distinctive elements related to migration —migration policies, age, length of migration, their own migratory status and that of the other family members, and their attachment to a family economy based on remittances. On this last point, some authors emphasize that deportation can represent a financial catastrophe for families that depend on remittances, such as transnational families (Herrera and Nyberg 2017, 26), for whom remittances constitute the only family support or the most representative economic income for consumption (Pintor-Sandoval and Bojórquez-Luque 2020, 29), especially during the pandemic (Bogado 2021; Pintor-Sandoval and Bojórquez-Luque 2020). As members of transnational families divided by borders (Dreby 2010), migration tools of forced removal, such as deportation, also impact the school records of these children and adolescents. Born in the United States or taken there by their parents at an early age as immigrants, and then moving to Mexico, these children and adolescents have been schooled in the US educational system and later in Mexican schools as part of their forced transnational mobility (Zúñiga, Hamann, and Sánchez 2008; Zúñiga and Hamann 2019). In the Mexican educational system, they encounter several specific obstacles that non-migrant students do not face: issues with enrolment, continuity, and school transit due to the bureaucratic ordeal resulting from their migratory status (Jacobo and Cárdenas 2020); language barriers due to the use of their primary (English) and inherited (Spanish) languages (Tacelosky 2021); a lack of cultural bridges and differences between the United States and Mexican educational systems (Zúñiga and Hamann 2019; Hamann and Zúñiga 2021); and the impacts of parental deportation and family separation on mental and emotional health (Barros 2017, 2019). In addition to the family separation experienced by transnational families during the Trump administration, during the April 2020–March 2021 period that we will focus on here, the most critical moments of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and Mexico, these families faced especially adverse circumstances in 526 International Migration Review 58(2) terms of unemployment and lack of access to social services such as health and education (Bogado 2021, 63). Although the pandemic was presented primarily as a health crisis, “it has a systemic scope, as it affects all dimensions of social life and is projected on a global scale”(Sanahuja 2020, 28). The pandemic has had a more significant impact in regions and countries already facing severe crises, such as Latin America (CEPAL-NU 2020) and Mexico (NU-México 2020), where it arrived at a time of increasing precarious employment and poverty and the onset of a health economic crisis (Hernández 2020, 21). In 2019, a year before the pandemic, the López Obrador government had cut the budget for health (Horton 2022), which resulted in a lower supply of medicine and medical supplies, a cut in health and administrative personnel, and a decrease in the supply and quality of health services (Lomelí 2020). The pandemic has had a significant impact on the lives of migrant students, who were already experiencing differential situations of vulnerability (CEPAL-NU 2020; Franzé 2020; Ortega 2020). Regarding the economic and educational spheres, the International Labor Organization (ILO) (2020) warned that the new school dynamics —which, like everywhere else in the world, shifted from face-to-face to distance learning —wouldleadtodropoutsduetoincreasedchild labor in Mexico. For transnational students in particular, during the April 2020– March 2021 period, the pandemic generated a series of cascading economic, educational, and health crises. After presenting the research methodology in the next section, we will analyze how these crises were articulated among transnational students in Oaxaca, given that what distinguishes them from other students also affected by the pandemic is their link to forced migration, as members of transnational families. Methodology Due to the conditions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, this study is based on a qualitative, ethnographic, and virtual methodology. Between November 2018 and February 2020, we conducted fieldwork studying the school (re)insertion process of transnational students from the United States. This fieldwork allowed access to five secondary (11–14 years old) and baccalaureate (15–17 years old) schools with a high concentration of migrants (Table 1). These schools are in the Valles Centrales, Sierra Norte, and Mixteca Alta regions, categorized as regions with a large population of migrants (Stephen 2016) affected by forced return under the Trump Administration (Figure 1). We accessed students and their families through these schools. The OIAM put us in contact with the school principals, who, after authorizing the development of the research, indicated which students had migration experience in the United States. We presented the study and its objectives to the school principals, the students, and their families. We asked them for informed consent for the application of the research techniques and guaranteed the anonymity of their identities to comply with the ethical Rodríguez-Cruz 527 principles of ethnographic research. The links we previously established with the study subjects allowed us to continue the research virtually during the pandemic. The selected schools registered 73 transnational students who arrived in Oaxaca in 2017–2020 (pre-pandemic), with some born in the United States (immigrants) and others in Mexico (returnees). The research sample we present here consists of 23 students aged 12–17 from Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nevada, New York, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington. The sample selection is determined by the characteristics of the subjects for this study: transnational students incorporated into the labor market due to the impact of the pandemic on family economies during the period of April 2020 to March 2021. Of the total sample, fifteen students were born in the United States and arrived in Oaxaca between the ages of nine and 15; the remaining eight were born in Mexico, migrated to the United States between the ages of zero and three, and returned in the same age range (nine to 15). Fourteen were enrolled in middle school and nine in high school. Four students self-identified as Indigenous (Zapotec, Mixtec, and Triqui), but none spoke an Indigenous language. Table 2 details the characteristics of the students according to the age of arrival in Oaxaca, age at the time of the study, educational level of enrollment in the schools, and place of origin from the United States. Between April 2020 and March 2021, we conducted 34 semi-structured interviews through Meet and phone calls with parents (four), teachers (seven), and students (23). 1 Interviews with students were conducted in English and Spanish and with parents and teachers only in Spanish. We developed virtual participant observations by accessing the teaching–learning platform (Meet) set up by schools and WhatsApp groups created for students who did not have the means to access it. We carried out seven classroom observations at the secondary and baccalaureate levels (Meet) and nine in WhatsApp groups at the same levels. The consultation Table 1. List of Educational Institutions, Levels, Environment, and Location. Name Educational level Environment (rural/urban) Location 1. Centro de Estudios Tecnológico 124 Baccalaureate Urban Tlacolula de Matamoros, Valles Centrales 2. Centro de Estudios Tecnológico 124 Baccalaureate Rural San Francisco Lachigoló, Valles Centrales 3. Secundaria Técnica 40 Secondary school Rural Ixtlán de Juárez, Sierra Norte 4. Secundaria Técnica 48 Secondary school Urban Tlacolula de Matamoros, Valles Centrales 5. Secundaria Federal Leyes de Reforma Secondary school Urban Heroica Ciudad de Tlaxiaco, Mixteca Alta Source: Own elaboration based on data collected. 528 International Migration Review 58(2) of statistical sources and press articles and the analysis of specialized literature on deportations, transnationalism, and transnational families and students complemented these techniques. Transnational Students Facing Multiple Crises: Old and New Challenges In this section, we analyze the impacts of three intertwined major crises triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic on the transnational students who were part of the study: Figure 1. Rodríguez-Cruz 529 Table 2. Educational Level of Enrollment, Age at Immigration/Return, Age at Time of Study, and Place of Origin from the United States. Immigration age Age at the time of the study Place of provenance from the United States Return age Age at the time of the study Place of provenance from the United States Middle school 10 12 California 12 12 California 11 12 California 11 13 Tennessee 11 12 California 12 14 California 12 13 Illinois 13 14 New York 11 13 Arizona 13 15 Washington 12 14 Nevada 11 14 Massachusetts 13 14 Texas 14 14 Georgia High school 14 15 Florida 14 16 Nevada 12 15 California 15 16 California 14 16 California 13 16 Washington 15 16 Arizona 13 16 Texas 17 17 New York Total 23 Immigrants 15 Returnees 8 Source: Own elaboration based on data collected. 530 firstwaveinspring2020(CentersforDiseaseControlandPreventionn.d.).Thesecond fear was related to the undocumented status of their parents, as they could eventually be deported during the pandemic. One student said: “I worry about my dad, he is a truck driver there [in the U.S.], and he moves around a lot from one place to another for his work, and who knows if the virus is wherever he goes. And he doesn’t have papers; if he gets infected, he can’t go to the hospital”(Esbeidy, 14 years old, immigrant, works in agriculture, mother deported, December 9, 2020). There were two cases where parents were deported during the pandemic. As they were seen as external vectors of contagion, the communities of origin limited their access to some extent, forcing them to quarantine in isolated municipal facilities. Among these migrants, there was a double stigma —that of being deported and that of being infected —even though one of them did not even contract the virus. This double stigma was extended to the offspring under the label “children of deported and infected parents,”along with others related to their previous migratory and socio-educational experience in the United States, which had already affected them before the pandemic (Rodríguez-Cruz 2022). For this reason, many transnational students concealed and denied their parents’situation. One teacher commented: “they hide the situation when the father or mother arrives from the U.S. Then, when you talk to them …they say ‘yes, teacher, my father is infected, but please don’t tell anyone’” (high school teacher, May 24, 2020). All these situations increased transnational students’anxiety levels and even their own self-suggestion of the virus, as “they themselves start to feel the symptoms of the sickness and they don’thaveit”(parent of the family, January 18, 2021). Moreover, these stigmas also informed the reasons that many of these students gave their teachers to justify their lack of concentration and the consequent decrease in their academic performance, citing reasons related to their alleged vagueness and their incorporation into the workforce: “I prefer the teachers to think that I don’t concentrate because I’m lazy or because I have to work, but not because my father got infected in the U.S. or was deported and arrived infected …it’s better …not to say” (Scarlett, 16 years old, returnee, works in a grocery shop, mother deported, father deported, February 24, 2021). Moreover, before the pandemic, Mexico had registered an unequal geographic distribution of health resources that was further accentuated following the outbreak (Sánchez-Talanquer et al. 2021). The richest urban areas of the country —Mexico City, Guadalajara, Nuevo León —had a greater volume of health personnel, equipment, and medical material, unlike the poorest and most rural states such as Oaxaca (Sánchez-Talanquer et al. 2021). During the pandemic, the loss of health service coverage especially affected the poorest states: Oaxaca decreased its health coverage from 83.7 percent to 63.1 percent (Signos Vitales 2021). These inequalities were also reflected in access to vaccines. Although the first vaccination campaign took place in Mexico between December 2020 and February 2021 (Manuel-Aragón 2021), the poorest states in Mexico were the last to receive the vaccines (Varela 2018). Oaxaca became a highly vulnerable state due to the scarcity of coronavirus Rodríguez-Cruz 537 tests (Sánchez-Talanquer et al. 2021), an insufficient number of vaccines, and, therefore, low vaccination rates (Salazar and Bernabé 2021; Signos Vitales 2021). During the development of this study, the parents of the transnational students had not yet been vaccinated due to the unavailability of vaccines in Oaxaca. Five of them contracted the coronavirus. In the absence of the other parent, many students had to take care of their sick parents and their younger siblings while taking all possible precautions to not get infected. Along with worrying about their parents in the United States and their work and academic activities, caring for other family members also increased their stress levels during the pandemic. One student reflected on her situation: It is a very difficult situation because my mom is there [in the U.S.] and I am worried that she will catch it. My dad is infected now, and he is isolated in a room, and I have to take care of him and also my little brothers. I also work taking care of some children and I also have school. It is very stressful, I have many responsibilities, but I am managing. (Rose, 16 years old, immigrant, January 20, 2021) Finally, the lack of employment and access to economic aid for undocumented immigrants in the United States occurred at the same time that the pandemic worsened the situation of the Mexican healthcare system, already affected by the budgetcutting policies of the López Obrador government in 2019 (Horton 2022). Many working-class families, like those of the transnational students in this research, did not have the financial capacity to access expensive antiviral drugs when they contracted the coronavirus. Moreover, shortages caused by the health system crisis and the unequal geographic distribution of health resources in Mexico also caused these medicines to become scarce in Oaxaca (Salazar and Bernabé 2021; Signos Vitales 2021). For transnational students with a parent in the United States, shortages of vaccines and antiviral drugs also created a care crisis when their parents contracted the virus in Oaxaca. One father explained this situation: I got infected a few months ago. Thank God I won the battle against the virus, but it was a very difficult situation. We don’t have medicines or tests here. I knew I had the virus because I got really sick. My wife is in California, she stayed there, but she lost her job because of the pandemic, so she can’t send us medicine from there either. My oldest son [15 years old] had to take care of everything. He took care of me, his little sister, the house …he also works in the field to help us with the economy. Thank God he took care of everything. (father of the family, February 17, 2021) Conclusions The policy of mass deportations developed by the United States in recent decades and intensified by the Trump administration has promoted family separation and the constitution of transnational families. The production of migration illegality affects all family members, in the United States and in Mexico alike, as is the case with the 538 International Migration Review 58(2) transnational students in this research. The restructuring of roles within a transnational family may respond not only to the necessary reconfiguration generated by forced transnationalism itself but also to crises such as those triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study has analyzed the impacts of three interconnected crises unleashed by the pandemic among transnational students in Oaxaca from April 2020 to March 2021: economic, educational, and health. The economic crisis led non-migrant and transnational students from workingclass families to take on new economic roles to support their families’household finances, which impacted their educations. For transnational students, this is largely due to the dependence of these household economies on remittances, which “are really just palliatives”(Pinillos, Masferrer, and Oropeza 2019, 6). These remittances are strongly conditional on migrants’regular immigration status and do not constitute a firm economic anchor upon which families forcibly returned to Mexico can rely on. The dependence on remittances was evident in the cases studied; transnational students were necessarily incorporated into the labor market, and they used their scholarships to contribute to their household finances. Unlike students with no migration experience, transnational students’access to social, economic, and educational rights in Mexico were affected because of their migration status, which made their situation worse. This is the case for many students who were born in the United States and did not have the necessary documentation to obtain a CURP and thus access scholarships to obtain economic assistance for their families. The change in the socio-economic role of transnational students who had to join the labor market out of necessity, like other non-migrant students, had an inevitable impact on their education. This shows that the pandemic pushed them to experience not only economic and health crises but also educational crises. The reduced availability of time for academic activities due to their insertion into the labor market played an important role in this crisis. However, the permanent effects of a precarious (re)insertion into the school system before the pandemic contributed as well. These effects were accentuated during the period studied and were mainly related to language barriers and the related deficits in knowledge acquisition, and these elements combined with the limitations of a virtual educational process, which was also a precarious virtuality. The need for programs to teach academic Spanish to transnational students whose primary language was English manifested with renewed harshness during the period of the pandemic examined, increasing the limitations that these students already had in this respect in face-to-face conditions. Difficulties in acquiring knowledge through the language of instruction were also intensified. In addition, virtuality, intermittent communication, lack of teacher training in ICT, and the digital divide in Oaxaca hindered any possibility of learning. Although the latter elements also affected students without migratory experience, the difficulties that transnational students had with academic Spanish prior to the pandemic exacerbated these effects. Rodríguez-Cruz 539 During the study, virtual precarity was also strongly linked to the decrease or cessation of remittances, which were necessary to buy laptops and data to access learning platforms or school WhatsApp groups and also to communicate with their parent in the United States. The need for communication with the absent parent in the context of a severe international health crisis was of considerable importance for transnational students and generated considerable emotional stress. As the results show, the students were primarily concerned with the possibility that their parents would contract COVID-19 in the United States and, as undocumented immigrants, would not be able to go to a hospital due to their lack of resources, risking death, as well as the possibility that their parents would be deported. When deportations were carried out during the pandemic, the children inherited the stigmas of their parents, labeled as a “child of a deported and infected parent.” The unequal geographic distribution of health resources in Mexico and the health system crisis —initiated with López Obrador’s cuts in 2019 and worsened during the pandemic —caused a shortage of tests, vaccines, and antiviral drugs that particularly affected rural and poor states such as Oaxaca. Even if these antiviral drugs had been available, they were expensive and inaccessible for working-class families, such as those of the transnational students in this study. The shortage of tests, vaccines, and medicine also generated a care crisis for transnational students when their parents were infected in Oaxaca. With the other parent in the United States, they had to take care of their infected parent and, where appropriate, their younger siblings. Along with concern for the well-being of the parent in the United States and their work and academic activities, this care crisis also increased the stress levels of transnational students during the period studied. As the results show, the students in this research experienced the economic, educational, and health crises generated by the pandemic in April 2020–March 2021 from distinctive positions of vulnerability. These were related to forced transnationalism based on the irregular status of migrants in the United States and their deportation. More research is needed to analyze the long-term implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on the present and future educational, social, health, and occupational situations of transnational students who find themselves in situations of vulnerability such as the ones analyzed here. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 540 International Migration Review 58(2) ORCID iD Marta Rodríguez-Cruz https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4035-4535 References Álvarez, S. 2017. “Movimientos migratorios contemporáneos: entre el control fronterizo y la producción de su ilegalidad. Un diálogo con Nicholas De Genova.”Íconos 58: 153–64. 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