Children and Families of Migrants

Abstract: Increasingly stringent immigration enforcement in the US interior has led to the deportation of large numbers of long-term Mexican immigrants with families in the USA. We analyse the statistical association between the intent to return to the USA and leaving minor children with spouses or other people in the USA among Mexican immigrants deported from the US interior in 2014–2018, and explore if this association varies by sex and year of deportation. We employ the deportees’ section of the Survey on Migration on Mexico's Northern Border. The results indicate that having left children in the USA considerably increases the likelihood of a plan to return to the USA, especially in the short term and when deportees left minor children with a spouse. Remigration plans were higher among women and slightly decreased over time among parents, suggesting a continued failure of policy to account for the family circumstances of immigrants.

Abstract: Since 2007, large numbers of Mexican migrants in the USA returned to Mexico voluntarily or through deportation. Theory argues that US immigration policy undermines immigrant health through the deprivations of undocumented legal status and deportation, but few studies have considered the combined influences of these exposures on health. We estimate the probability of poor self-rated health, recent physical health symptoms, and recent mental health symptoms by legal status and deportation experience among 42,853 Mexican migrants surveyed in the Survey of Migration in the Northern Border of Mexico (EMIF-Norte) between 2012 and 2014. Deportation is more strongly associated with health than undocumented legal status among returnees in Mexico. Considering the two dimensions of immigration enforcement combined reveals the especially poor health and mental health status of deported returnees, regardless of their legal status in the USA.

Abstract

The 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program granted work authorization and protection from deportation to more than 800,000 young undocumented immigrants who arrived to the United States as minors. We estimate the association between this expansion of legal rights and birth outcomes among 72,613 singleton births to high school–educated Mexican immigrant women in the United States from June 2010 to May 2014, using birth records data from the National Center for Health Statistics. Exploiting the arbitrariness of the upper age cutoff for DACA eligibility and using a difference-in-differences design, we find that DACA was associated with improvements in the rates of low birth weight and very low birth weight, birth weight in grams, and gestational age among Mexican immigrant mothers.

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Abstract: This article examines how unauthorized immigrant status is associated with the risk of suffering a work-related accident or illness and with the use of medical services after experiencing an injury among Mexican immigrants in the United States. Using individual-level data on 81,004 Mexican immigrants who previously worked in the United States and were interviewed when they returned to Mexico in the Survey of Migration in the Northern Border of Mexico from 2010 to 2018, we estimate a series of probit models and nonlinear decompositions to analyze legal status differences in the incidence of occupational injuries among immigrant workers. The results show that among Mexican immigrants in the United States unauthorized status was associated with a greater probability of experiencing an occupational injury. The higher injury rate among unauthorized immigrants was partly driven by the fact that they worked more hours per day, more days per week, and were employed in riskier occupations than authorized immigrants. If unauthorized immigrants were older and had higher levels of English-language ability, the injury gap would have been even larger. Unauthorized status was also associated with a lower likelihood of using medical services after suffering an occupational injury because unauthorized workers had less access to medical care. The findings show that the right to legal work has important implications for the health of immigrants by setting a higher risk level for injury on the job and limiting access to health care following such an injury.

Abstract

This essay provides an analysis of urgent and pragmatic solutions to the persistent forced migration challenges in Central America’s Northern Triangle that President Joe Biden could undertake in the first two years of his administration. Its focus is on measures that the United States can undertake to help these nations avert the enormous humanitarian crisis brought about by the pandemic and recent hurricanes, including starvation, a surge in violence, and a rise in extreme poverty, all of which are fueling an increase in forced migration from the region. Specifically, the essay is focused on two measures: (1) Stabilizing the flow of remittances from the U.S. to the region; and (2) increasing and strategically reorienting aid to these nations to the most vulnerable communities affected by the pandemic.
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Between 2000 and 2015, the U.S. deported unprecedented numbers of Mexican immigrants. During the same period, the population of U.S.-born children living in Mexico doubled in size. This study estimates the number of U.S.-born children who emigrated to Mexico from the United States in order to accompany a deported parent: de facto deported children. The data come from the Mexican National Survey of Demographic Dynamics (ENADID), a national probability sample of households in Mexico collected in 2014 and 2018. About one in six U.S.-born children living in Mexico in 2014/2018, amounting to an estimated 80,000–100,000 U.S.-born children, were there because the U.S. government deported one or both of their parents. De facto deported U.S.-born children are socioeconomically disadvantaged in Mexico compared to U.S.-born children whose parents migrate to Mexico for other reasons. Women are overrepresented among deported people who bring their U.S.-born children to Mexico, and when deported mothers bring their children, they are far less likely to do so with a partner than are deported fathers. U.S. policy should consider the interests of U.S. citizen children forced to live abroad when redesigning immigration and child welfare policies.

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Objectives

The USA maintains the world’s largest immigration detention system. This study examines the mechanisms by which detention serves as a catalyst for worsening health.

Methods

Using data from detained immigrants in California (n = 493) from 2013 to 2014, we assessed the prevalence of exposure to conditions of confinement hypothesized to negatively influence health; the extent to which conditions of confinement are associated with psychological stress, diagnosed mental health conditions, and/or declines in general health; and the cumulative impact of confinement conditions on these outcomes.

Results

We found that each condition increased the likelihood of one or more negative health conditions, but there was also a cumulative effect: for each additional confinement condition, the odds of worsening general health rose by 39% and reporting good health decreased by 24%.

Conclusions

Confinement conditions are associated with poor physical and mental health outcomes among immigrants detained in immigration prisons. Policies that seek to improve specific conditions in detention centers may remove some risks of harm, but alternatives to detention are likely to be most effective.

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Restrictive US immigration laws and law enforcement undermine immigrant health by generating fear and stress, disrupting families and communities, and eroding social and economic wellbeing. The inequality and stress created by immigration law and law enforcement may also generate disparities in health among immigrants with different legal statuses. However, existing research does not find consistent evidence of immigrant legal status disparities in health, possibly because it does not disaggregate immigrants by generation, defined by age at migration. Immigration and life course theory suggest that the health consequences of non-citizen status may be greater among 1.5-generation immigrants, who grew up in the same society that denies them formal membership, than among the 1st generation, who immigrated as adolescents or adults. In this study, we examine whether there are legal status disparities in health within and between the 1st generation and the 1.5 generation of 23,288 Latinx immigrant adults interviewed in the 2005–2017 waves of the California Health Interview Survey. We find evidence of legal status disparities in heart disease within the 1st generation and for high blood pressure and diabetes within the 1.5 generation. Non-citizens have higher rates of poor self-rated health and distress within both generations. Socioeconomic disadvantage and limited access to care largely account for the worse health of legally disadvantaged 1st- and 1.5-generation Latinx adults in California.

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Abstract: Hepatitis E virus is a common cause of acute viral hepatitis. We analyzed reports of hepatitis E outbreaks among forcibly displaced populations in sub-Saharan Africa during 2010-2020. Twelve independent outbreaks occurred, and >30,000 cases were reported. Transmission was attributed to poor sanitation and overcrowding.

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Abstract: This chapter focuses on recently published personal stories of migration, whether in the form of narratives of migrants asserting their autonomy of movement as they confront ever more abundant and perilous challenges, or of repatriated migrants unable to respond to a highly fortified border industrial complex that subordinates them with ever harsher callousness and cruelty. These stories – a travel narrative by a Haitian migrant, a series of children’s books written by deported mothers, and a digital storytelling project – reflect recent phenomena that have yet to be taken up meaningfully in more prestigious and widely distributed works. The chapter focuses on testimonial genres, with the aim of understanding their effectiveness in communicating lived experiences within and across the open wounds of contemporary borders in the Americas and in relating the emotional consequences of forced displacement, undocumented border crossing, migrant criminalization, xenophobic violence, and detention and deportation regimes. These stories were all published with a certain urgency from what for many migrants remains the deepest, most painful, and longest-festering lesion in the Americas, the USA–Mexico borderlands. These stories’ poignancy is achieved less through literariness than from raw experience, as they document new dynamics of human displacement in the Americas.

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