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The Painful and Chilling Effects of Legal Violence: Immigration Enforcement and Racialized Legal Status Inequities in Worker Well-Being

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Abstract

A wave of restrictive immigration policies implemented over the past several decades dramatically increased immigrant detentions and deportations in the United States (U.S.), with important consequences for a host of immigrant outcomes. Still, questions remain as to how temporal and geographic variation in immigration enforcement within and across the U.S. shaped racialized legal status inequities in health and well-being, particularly among those employed in precarious occupations. To fill this gap, we interrogated the links between changes in county-level immigration enforcement and racialized legal status inequalities in musculoskeletal pain and social welfare benefits utilization among U.S. agricultural workers over nearly two decades (2002–2018). We merged data from three sources [(1) restricted-access, geocoded data from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) (n = 37,619); (2) county-level immigration enforcement data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC); and (3) population data from the Census and American Community Survey (ACS)] and estimated linear probability models with year, month, and state fixed effects. We show that, in counties with high enforcement rates, workers—especially undocumented workers—were at increased risk of musculoskeletal pain, including pain that was severe. Heightened enforcement was also associated with declines in needs-based benefits utilization, especially among documented and U.S.-citizen non-White workers and undocumented White and non-White workers. Together, these findings highlight how changes in sociopolitical and legal contexts can shift and maintain racialized legal status hierarchies, with especially important consequences for the well-being of vulnerable workers.

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Data availability

Data from the National Agricultural Workers Survey are restricted-use. For access, please contact Daniel Carroll, Office of Policy Development and Research, Employment and Training Administration, U.S. Department of Labor, 200 Constitution Ave NW, Room N-5641, Washington, DC 20210; email: Carroll.Daniel.J@dol.gov; phone: 202-693-2795. Data from the Transactional Records Action Clearinghouse are restricted to use by TRAC Fellows. For more information about how to apply, visit https://trac.syr.edu/fellows/. All Stata and R code pertaining to data preparation and analyses informing the results of this article are available upon request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2022 Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association and the Population Association of America. This research was supported by the Network on Life Course Health Dynamics and Disparities in 21st Century America (NLCHDD) via grant # 2 R24 AG 045061-06 from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and by the NIA under grant award T32 AG000243 (PI: David Meltzer, MD, PhD). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NIA. C.B. is also grateful to the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania (National Institutes of Health’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH Grant No. R24HD044964) and the Axilrod Faculty Fellowship program at the University of Pennsylvania for general support.

Funding

This work is supported by the National Institute on Aging (Grant Nos. T32AG000243, 2 R24 AG 045061-06), Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Grant No. R24 HD044964).

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  1. Courtney E. Boen and Rebecca Anna Schut are equal first authors.

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  1. Department of Sociology and Graduate Group in Demography, Population Studies and Population Aging Research Centers, Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, University of Pennsylvania, 232 McNeil Building, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA, 19104-6299, USA

    Courtney E. Boen

  2. The Center for Health and the Social Sciences, The University of Chicago, Chicago, USA

    Rebecca Anna Schut

  3. Department of Sociology, Princeton University, Princeton, USA

    Nick Graetz

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Boen, C.E., Schut, R.A. & Graetz, N. The Painful and Chilling Effects of Legal Violence: Immigration Enforcement and Racialized Legal Status Inequities in Worker Well-Being. Popul Res Policy Rev 43, 20 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-024-09862-x

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