Anuradha Sajjanhar, PhD on Immigrants’ Role in Pandemic Recovery

This week on JobMakers, host Denzil Mohammed talks with Dr. Anuradha Sajjanhar, lead researcher for the report Immigrant Essential Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic published by The Immigrant Learning Center, co-producer of this podcast. She found that immigrants, despite playing an outsized role in industries deemed essential. such as healthcare, food and agriculture, and the supply chain, were largely left out of federal and state support during the pandemic, which negatively affected their safety and their efforts to help Americans weather this crisis. The report offers a path forward, as you’ll learn in this week’s JobMakers.

Guest:

Anuradha Sajjanhar, Ph.D is a 2021-2024 Postdoctoral Fellow in Policy and Governance at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, and a New Generation Network Scholar at the Australia India Institute. Her work focuses on the intersection of comparative politics, communication studies, political sociology, and public policy. Her work has been published in Economic and Political Weekly, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Journal of Political Ideologies, as well as in national and international newspapers. She earned her Ph.D in Sociology from the University of Minnesota in 2020, where she was a Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. She holds an M.A in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics, a B.A in English Literature from the University of York, and has several years of work experience in policy research and evaluation.