Filipino Migrant Caregivers in Israel during COVID-19: Enhancing Communal Social Capital via Facebook

The COVID-19 pandemic has differentially affected citizens and non-citizens, both asylum seekers and migrant workers, worldwide. We explore how the Filipino caregiver migrant community in Israel used social media to cope with the unique challenges its members faced during the first months of the pandemic. Based on digital ethnography on Facebook and interviews, our findings reveal that these challenges included loss of their jobs with no government support, loss of their day off and the ability to meet other Filipino caregivers in person, limited access to information onCOVID-19 relevant to Israel and potential loss of their visa after giving birth. To cope with these challenges, they utilized Facebook to (1) manage self-help philanthropic campaigns assisting the needy; (2) organize digital communal events, enabling isolated Filipino caregivers to be actively involved; (3) provide information on COVID-19 in Israel and in the Filipino community and (4)create a communal operation to send babies to the Philippines to obey regulations concerning migrant women who gave birth. While complying with strict lock down and social distancing regulations, the Filipino caregiver community developed new modalities of conduct via social media platforms and cultivated online communal social capital, which expanded the well-established social capital that already existed in the community.. (מתוך המאמר)