Jucosta Wilson of Walton, Kentucky, considers herself fortunate. Laid off in March, when pandemic-driven lockdowns caused unemployment to surge dramatically, she got rehired as a medical assistant at a dermatologist’s office three months later. But that gap in income, plus her husband’s loss of employment, caused the couple to miss some rent payments and their landlord wants them out.

“We’re being pushed into a situation that’s beyond our control. It’s not only hard to get out of that situation, but it’s even harder to survive in that situation,” says Ms. Wilson. The couple has a court date set for four days before Christmas.

In a gritty part of East Boston it’s only 5 p.m. and already dark, and raining. Nearly a dozen people brave the cold for a weekend rally at 168 Gove St., where the owner wants to evict his tenants – not because of nonpayment of rent but because he wants to develop condos. 

The group, organized by a social justice organization, chants slogans and listens to short speeches in Spanish and English next to a big banner that reads: “Eviction Free Zone.” 

Despite a nationwide moratorium ordered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a few remaining state and local restrictions, evictions are ticking up across the United States. If Congress does not approve emergency rental and other assistance before the end of the year, today’s trickle of displaced tenants will become a flood that would be unprecedented for its size and speed. It is particularly worrisome during the pandemic, where evidence is mounting that the housing exodus is spreading the virus. 

Families are doubling up at times when medical professionals want them to socially distance. Shelters, overwhelmed even in normal times, are already pushing out some of their existing clients because state and local mandates are forcing them to reduce capacity.

“The eviction crisis we are facing right now is historic,” says Diane Yentel, head of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a social-policy organization in Washington. “If government doesn’t intervene, we’re looking at the very real possibility of tens of millions of people losing their homes this winter during this height of the coronavirus spread.”

Evictions actually spread the virus, according to a study released two weeks ago and not yet peer-reviewed. Researchers at UCLA and several other major universities found that states that lifted their moratoriums on evictions during the summer had 5.4 times more pandemic-related fatalities than states that kept their moratoriums in place for an extra 16 weeks. 

“That amounted to 10,700 deaths due to eviction and COVID-19 that were entirely preventable,” says Emily Benfer, co-creator of the Eviction Lab at Princeton University and a law professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. For Congress “to turn their back on the health and well-being of adults and children across the country is unconscionable, especially at a time when their lives literally depend upon staying housed.”

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Alexandra Machuca, a tenant and intern organizer at a Boston social justice group, reads a statement during a vigil on Dec. 12, 2020, in East Boston. Residents are fighting eviction by a new landlord who wants to renovate the building.

No one knows how many evictions have taken place so far. The Eviction Lab, which tracks the forced removal of tenants in 27 U.S. cities, says landlords have filed 155,000 evictions since the pandemic. If the CDC moratorium is allowed to run out without some form of financial aid quickly, some 30 million to 40 million Americans could lose housing in a matter of weeks or months, according to an Aspen Institute study.

A key reason: The pandemic has meant reduced income for legions of Americans whose employment is tied to in-person services – from food and entertainment to retail shops and personal-care salons. Very often those workers are renters.

An emergency boost in unemployment benefits, coupled with the temporary eviction bans, helped stave off a crisis for renters in 2020.

But Congress has struggled to come up with a follow-on relief package after the roughly $2 trillion CARES Act was passed in March. As of Tuesday, Republican and Democratic negotiators seemed closer to agreement on a stimulus package of about $900 billion that could include provisions to delay a flood of evictions, such as $25 billion in rental assistance plus $300 a week in extra unemployment benefits for 16 weeks, to help struggling tenants. 

For many renters, the future looks uncertain.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Tenant Alexandra Machuca, an intern organizer at City Life/Vida Urbana, a Boston social-justice community group, stands on the stairwell of her apartment building on Dec.12, 2020 in East Boston, Massachusetts. She is a 4th-floor tenant with her parents, sister, and aunt.

“I’m very scared about what’s going to happen. I mean, am I going to be evicted?” asks Shelby Brown, a single mother in Crittenden, Kentucky, who took a leave of absence in May to shepherd her children through the end of online school. Come summer, without any child care options, she quit her job as a pharmacy technician, which put her behind on rent, though a local anti-poverty nonprofit has since stepped in to help cover it.

“This has been our home for years now,” says Ms. Brown, who is still unemployed. “And I’m obviously trying to figure out what I’m going to do because I’ve applied for jobs but it doesn’t seem like anything that I’m doing is going to get me where I financially was.”

If current funding and protections expire, the number of evictions will go “completely through the roof” in January, says Kevin Finn, of Strategies to End Homelessness, a Cincinnati nonprofit. And due to social distancing precautions, homeless shelters are taking in fewer people. In Cincinnati and the surrounding county, the number of people sleeping outside has risen 35% between January and October, he adds. He attributes that to reduced shelter capacity, but also to family and friends being less available to host people who lose their housing, due to health concerns brought on by the pandemic.

The eviction crisis is also a landlord crisis. Stout Risius Ross, a global consulting firm, estimates that landlords will be owed somewhere between $13.2 billion and $24.4 billion in back rent by January. Much of the low-income housing in the United States is provided by mom and pop landlords who depend on rental payments for their own livelihoods.

“It is only a matter of time before both renters and housing providers reach the end of their resources,” said Doug Bibby, president of the National Multifamily Housing Council in a statement. The group, which represents landlords, found that three-quarters of renters had paid their December rent in the first week of the month, a nearly 8 percentage point decline from the same week a year ago.  

Hardest hit are people of color. Last month, 30.6% of Black rental households and 17.5% of Hispanic households were behind in their rent, according to the Census Bureau. By contrast, 11.5% of white non-Hispanic rental households were in arrears. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

The residents of this East Boston building are fighting eviction by a new landlord who wants to renovate the property, Dec. 12, 2020.

A new home “is very hard to find,” says Melvin Acevedo, a tenant of the East Boston apartment complex that the landlord wants to turn into condos. A professional window washer, who has seen his work dwindle as owners of empty office buildings cut back on expenses, he and his family have managed to stay current with rent through careful saving. But finding a new place in gentrifying Boston? “It’s very expensive,” he says.   

“The state has never seen this before,” says Lisa Owens, executive director of City Life/Vida Urbana, the local social justice group fighting the East Boston evictions. The ongoing evictions linked to gentrification, coupled with the surge of pandemic-related evictions for nonpayment, will create a wave that could overwhelm local and state government, she says. “We are not equipped to deal with this.”

One way the CARES Act has improved things for at-risk renters is that it has opened up more money for nonprofits to reach people, and work with them and their landlords, before they get evicted or become homeless.

“So our normal model where … people have to already be homeless before [government] can assist them, is actually the least cost-effective way to combat the issue of homelessness,” Mr. Finn says.

In Kentucky, Ms. Brown has been preparing for the worst, filling out reams of paperwork to apply for a rental-assistance program and going to food pantries. “You’re always hoping that things are going to get better and things are going to be where they need to be to work out. And sometimes I feel like they do for me,” she says. “But, you know, you still have to prepare.”

Editor’s note: As a public service, we have removed our paywall for all pandemic-related stories.

When hundreds of flag-waving Ethiopian immigrants descended from a passenger jet to kiss the tarmac in Israel this month, they were feted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a ceremony reminiscent of the celebrated airlift of tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews at the end of the last century.

But for Surafel Alamo, a university student who immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia in 2006, it was a bittersweet moment. That’s because Mr. Alamo’s two sisters remain in Gondar – an Ethiopian city buffeted by the country’s civil war and the pandemic – waiting for word from Israel about when they will be able to emigrate as well.

His sisters belong to a group of approximately 8,000 impoverished Jews in Gondar and Addis Ababa who are short of food and medicine as they wait for Israel to fulfill a 2015 decision to bring the entirety of the community on aliyah – Hebrew for Jewish immigration to Israel.

“The war is dangerous for them,” says Mr. Alamo, a spokesman for the Struggle for the Aliyah of Ethiopian Jewry, describing soldiers in the streets and rocket attacks from the rebellious province of Tigray. “They are scared for their life. It’s too bad that Israel isn’t taking care of them. The people there are suffering. They lack the basics.”

Since the 2015 pledge, 2,250 Ethiopian Jews have been brought to Israel. In October, the government decided to bring another 2,000 by the end of the year – a decision pushed by Absorption Minister Pnina Tamano-Shata, Israel’s first Ethiopian Cabinet member.

Ethiopian activists lament the government’s comparatively slow pace on immigration and charge that it reflects a pattern of discrimination toward African Jews that also manifests itself in policing in Israel and the immigrants’ economic struggles here. They accuse Mr. Netanyahu, who promised to bring 7,500 immigrants to Israel before the country’s election last March, of using the issue to win the votes of the country’s 150,000 Ethiopian Jews. A new election may be looming in early 2021.

“If they were really interested in aliyah, they would do it over a couple of months. But they do it little by little before elections,” says Mr. Alamo. “If [war] had taken place amid Jewish communities in the U.S., France, or the former Soviet Union, the government would declare an emergency aliyah. But because this concerns Black Ethiopian Jews, the government doesn’t rush.”

A week before the Dec. 3 arrival of the planeload of Ethiopian Jews, about 200 protesters demonstrated outside Mr. Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem. With pictures of relatives in Ethiopia, they chanted “wake up” and held signs reading, “Don’t stop aliyah because of color.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment, but an Israeli official who asked not to be identified says “budget constraints” have forced the government to implement the 2015 decision in phases.

Sebastian Scheiner/AP

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (center) attends an immigration ceremony at the Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv, Israel, Dec. 3, 2020. Some critics of Mr. Netanyahu see political opportunism in the timing of immigrant arrivals from Ethiopia.

While the largest group of Ethiopian Jews, the Beta Israel, traces its history back to the fourth century, the community’s Jewishness was questioned by some Israelis in the country’s early years before being affirmed by the country’s chief rabbis in the early 1970s.

Israel carried out dramatic airlifts of Ethiopians in two waves between 1984 and 1991, including flying some 14,300 immigrants in less than two days in May 1991, known as Operation Solomon. Yet while the country simultaneously celebrated and neglected the new arrivals, the government struggled to come up with an approach to tens of thousands of Ethiopian Christians with Jewish lineage – known pejoratively as Falash Mura – who left the Jewish community over the centuries but were seeking to return.

Successive commissions in the 1990s sought to develop a policy. Since then, Ethiopian Jews arrived here gradually. The government twice declared the immigration over, only to relent.

“Almost 30 years ago, Israel Radio declared very dramatically, ‘The Ethiopian exile is over.’ People thought that this is the end of the story. Soon after that, there are other people there in Addis Ababa with questions about their status,” says Steven Kaplan, a sociology professor at Hebrew University who focuses on the Ethiopian Jewish community.

“There are questions: Is this a Jewish migration issue or a humanitarian issue? … What’s clear is that each time the government accepts this idea that ‘There’s a relatively small number, we’re going to bring that number, and it’s going to be over.’ And each time, it turns out that there are” thousands more.

Similarly, Israel’s 2015 decision came some two years after it declared Ethiopian Jewish immigration completed.

The piecemeal nature of the immigration has split numerous families, with those in Israel sending financial support back to relatives, some of whom, having left rural villages in hopes of emigrating, have waited for years in shacks of mud and corrugated metal in migrant quarters of Gondar and Addis Ababa.

Mr. Alamo says he sends sums of 2,000 shekels ($600) whenever possible. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, his sisters, who are in their 30s, are no longer able to earn money selling coffee to pedestrians. Now the war has made telephone conversations more unpredictable.

“The people there are suffering. It’s we who are helping them,” he says. “If families here don’t send money, they have nothing to eat.”

Mulugeta Ayene/AP/File

Members of Ethiopia’s Jewish community gather below a banner reading “Welcome” in Amharic, English, and Hebrew to protest an Israeli government decision to not allow all of them to immigrate to Israel, at the synagogue in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Nov. 19, 2018.

Activists and community members allege the Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental organization promoting immigration, and other Jewish organizations have not sufficiently focused on the plight of the community nor devoted enough resources.

“There is a humanitarian crisis,” says Alisa Bodner, an American Israeli activist for Ethiopian Jewish immigration. “No other Jewish community in the world is facing a crisis like this. Yet the majority of the Jewish world has turned its back on the community, including the state of Israel.”

Jewish Agency Director-General Amira Ahronoviz says the organization has been ramping up its humanitarian aid operation in Ethiopia over the last two years and considers it “very effective.” The effort currently includes 15 staff members, daily food aid to children, the distribution of hygiene products, and medical care.

Immigration from Ethiopia is an important part of the agency’s mission, she says. At the same time, the scope of that mission depends on Israeli policy. “We serve based on the government decisions, and eligibility [for immigration] is defined by” the Interior Ministry, Ms. Ahronoviz says.

Ms. Tamano-Shata, who toured a Jewish neighborhood in Ethiopia before the recent airlift, in August began promoting a $300 million plan to implement the 2015 decision, hoping to bring 4,500 immigrants by the end of the year.

Her appointment as absorption minister was a milestone just months after Ethiopians in Israel went to the streets by the tens of thousands in the summer of 2019 to protest police violence toward Black youths. In addition, during the election campaign of early 2020, Prime Minister Netanyahu lured an Ethiopian politician in a rival party to come to the Likud and appointed him deputy public security minister.

Despite that, police profiling hasn’t eased much, says Avi Yalou, an Ethiopian Israeli community activist. Mr. Yalou describes Mr. Netanyahu’s overtures to the Ethiopian community as “cheap populism.”

“Every time they say, ‘Now we’ll bring another 1,000.’ What is this, trading on a financial market?” he says. “There are grandparents that haven’t seen their grandkids. This is something that is unacceptable.”

As universities consider how to woo international students for the coming year, the views of one group in particular stand out: young people from China.

Despite tension between the two countries, Chinese students have traditionally numbered the most from any nation studying in the United States. Growth in their ranks has leveled off after years of double-digit annual increases, for reasons ranging from concerns about gun violence to Trump administration policies on China.

Now the pandemic is also influencing decisions. But institutions are wondering if a Biden administration, with its stated appreciation for the talent and diversity brought by international students, might be enough to reverse the trend of a thinning pipeline.

“The fundamental tragedy of this [current] administration’s choices is that some of it may be irreparable,” says Bob Murphy, chief policy officer for the Michigan Association of State Universities. “The United States has been seen as special in many ways: rule of law, its historic external orientation, investment in public higher education. And when you disrupt norms, it shakes faith in the foundation of the country and it’s going to be harder to demonstrate to international students it won’t happen again.”

In September, the U.S. State Department announced that in recent months it had revoked the student visas of more than 1,000 Chinese nationals on the grounds that they were “high-risk graduate students and research scholars.”

The Trump administration has previously raised concerns that some Chinese citizens granted U.S. student visas pose security risks through involvement in nontraditional espionage. The administration’s China strategy, released in May, emphasized support for Chinese students and researchers while saying U.S. officials would “screen out the small minority of Chinese applicants who attempt to enter the United States under false pretenses or with malign intent.”

Next steps

In an open letter published on Dec. 3, Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University in New York, urged President-elect Joe Biden to act quickly on international student policies, including those that limit stays and work opportunities. Among his list of remedies: “End paranoia of Chinese students.”

“Instead of enlisting universities to monitor foreign-born students and visiting scholars, particularly if they are ethnically Chinese,” Mr. Bollinger writes, “focus again on attracting – and welcoming – the brightest minds in the world, regardless of nationality or country of origin.”

Mr. Biden has not yet outlined a detailed China strategy, but has emphasized taking a united approach with allies, an approach which could bring about a more consistent and moderate policy. Experts believe the Biden administration will take a more targeted approach to security concerns. Former ambassador Julia Chang Bloch, president of the US-China Education Trust, says the incoming administration would likely do more to promote diplomacy at the local level.

“If you don’t have people-to-people exchanges and especially education exchanges, who is there to provide another picture?” she says, referring to the way the U.S. is often depicted in China. “It is that people-to-people exchange pillar, the educational exchange … that’s what can still continue to hold at least the channels of communication open and continue to have views and messages transmitted, and that’s very important when all else fails.” 

With regards to international students, analysts expect Mr. Biden would return to a more open Obama-era policy. In loosely detailing immigration policy plans, the incoming administration has cited research pegging the yearly contribution of foreign-born workers at $2 trillion. Among other signaling, Mr. Biden’s team has announced plans to grant green cards to foreign graduates of U.S. doctoral programs, as “losing these highly trained workers to foreign economies is a disservice to our own economic competitiveness.”

New realities?

Even with a change in the White House, what’s still unclear is what Chinese leader Xi Jinping will allow students to do. “It works both ways,” says Mr. Murphy of the Michigan Association of State Universities. China’s ministry of education last year issued an alert warning students that U.S. visa restrictions could impact their study in America.

Moreover, some experts believe that regardless of the change in U.S. administration, fewer Chinese students are likely to come to the United States – and that may not be a bad thing. Marguerite Dennis, an international education consultant, writes that “countries heavily dependent on Chinese student enrolments … can no longer expect Chinese students to enrol in the numbers they have for decades” for several reasons, including “economic insecurity in China and geopolitical tensions.”

The shift could prompt innovation by forcing U.S. universities to reimagine how they operate – a necessity in the post-COVID-19 world, she writes.

Universities in the U.S. have come to rely on the revenue brought by Chinese young people, with nearly 370,000 students studying at U.S. schools in 2018-19. Chinese students contributed $14.9 billion to the U.S. economy in 2018, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the U.S. Department of Commerce. International students overall contributed about $39 billion during the 2019-20 academic year, according to NAFSA: Association of International Educators.

At Michigan Technological University, an engineering magnet on the Upper Peninsula, the association for Chinese students dates back to the 1920s. “These students’ culture enriches our area, and we hope to sustain that,” says John Lehman, vice president for university relations and enrollment. The university of 7,000 enrolled nearly 300 Chinese students a few years ago, down to about 100 this year.

Rethinking their options

U.S. schools are competing with those in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom for students. China is also investing heavily in its own higher education system, with an increasing trend for students to stay home.

Chinese graduate student Wang Yixuan recently chose England for her studies, because of tensions between China and the U.S., and because “in the U.S. the gun has not been banned,” she says.

Ms. Wang returned home in March to Changsha and finished her courses online, and is currently interning for a Chinese company. About to complete her one-year master’s in global supply chain management at the University of Leeds in England, she says financial considerations were also a factor in her choice. Tuition, room, and board add up to be less than in the U.S. Overall, she’s happy about her decision. “England is so beautiful,” she gushes. “And it’s so different from China.”

The pandemic is also making the job of recruiting more difficult, putting more pressure on the incoming administration. The failure to control the spread last spring in the U.S., coupled with the virus’s resurgence this fall, has led many Chinese students to return home.

“I knew a lot of students who were studying in the United States, but because of COVID, most of them have decided to come back to China,” says Jin Xinhe, a senior studying marketing at Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics in the coastal city of Hangzhou. “COVID there is very widespread,” she says, unlike in China, where the virus is under control and she can attend classes in person now.

Ms. Jin originally planned to go to graduate school in the U.S., but has now decided to stay in China and start her own online jewelry sales business. “Due to COVID and also the market impacting my choices,” she says, “I plan to first work a couple of years and then decide whether to go overseas.”

Reuters

Belarus opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya talks with German Parliament President Wolfgang Schaeuble in Berlin, Dec. 14.

For decades, Europe has led the world in establishing a norm against the use of torture by governments. Since August, however, its leaders have faltered in responding to the well-documented torture of hundreds of pro-democracy protesters in Belarus, a former Soviet state in eastern Europe. Now Europe may finally be bringing its moral bearings to one of its own, all too aware that a continent known for atrocities in the last century must set a standard against crimes of humanity.

On Dec. 12, Switzerland froze the financial assets of the leader of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, and 14 others for the use of violence against protesters. A few days earlier, the International Olympic Committee put sanctions on the country’s National Olympic Committee and banned Mr. Lukashenko from the next Games. In neighboring Lithuania, law enforcement officials are gathering testimony from exiled Belarusians to prepare for trials of security officers accused of torture. And the Council of Europe, which consists of 47 member states, plans to discuss a legislative measure aimed at investigating the mistreatment of Belarusian citizens by police.

All this comes as Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who by most accounts won the Aug. 9 presidential election against Mr. Lukashenko, has been touring Europe asking for action against the use of torture in her country.

“Every time I meet with heads of state, I try to convey this pain. We try to tell them about the innocent people who have been locked up and about the humiliation they are being subjected to. We try to appeal to their conscience, saying, ‘You proclaim the primacy of human rights, and look what’s happening in the country next door, while all you do is express concern. How is that possible?’” she told The New Yorker.

Her pleas along with those of others are working on one key player in Belarus. In mid-November, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov condemned the Belarusian police for their brutality. The Kremlin’s support of Mr. Lukashenko may be wavering as polls show a shift among Belarusians away from the country’s traditional alliance with Russia and toward Europe.

Every weekend since the rigged election four months ago, protests have continued in Belarus. By mid-September, the United Nations had received 450 reports of torture and other abuse of detainees. Human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch, Nash Dom, Amnesty International have taken the testimony of hundreds of victims who describe beatings, prolonged stress positions, and electric shocks.

The increase in foreign pressure, along with the protests, could be creating dissent within the regime’s security forces. “This system will devour itself,” Ms. Tsikhanouskaya told an independent Belarusian news site. “We need to take to the streets consistently every week, speak about a new election, about principles, about a future Belarus, make friendship with other countries.”

In late January, Ms. Tsikhanouskaya is expected to meet with Joe Biden in Washington after he becomes president. For now, her focus is on the European Union, a friend of Belarus and the world’s standard-bearer against torture. It is finally awakening to torture in its own backyard and the response it demands.