Abstract
We examine Latino citizen children in mixed-status families and how their physical health status compares to their U.S. citizen, co-ethnic counterparts. We also examine Latino parents’ perceptions of state immigration policy and its implications for child health status. Using the 2015 Latino National Health and Immigration Survey (n = 1493), we estimate a series of multivariate ordered logistic regression models with mixed-status family and perceptions of state immigration policy as primary predictors. We find that mixed-status families report worse physical health for their children as compared to their U.S. citizen co-ethnics. We also find that parental perceptions of their states’ immigration status further exacerbate health disparities between families. These findings have implications for scholars and policy makers interested in immigrant health, family wellbeing, and health disparities in complex family structures. They contribute to the scholarship on Latino child health and on the erosion of the Latino immigrant health advantage.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge and thank Dr. Francisco I. Pedraza for developing the survey question “Thinking about the immigrant population in your state, would you describe [STATE] policies as favorable or unfavorable towards immigrants?”.
Funding
The project described is supported, in part, by a NICHD training grant to the University of Wisconsin–Madison (T32HD049302) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institutes of Health, or the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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Vargas, E.D., Ybarra, V.D. U.S. Citizen Children of Undocumented Parents: The Link Between State Immigration Policy and the Health of Latino Children. J Immigrant Minority Health 19, 913–920 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10903-016-0463-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10903-016-0463-6