Latinos' Connections to Immigrants: How Knowing a Deportee Impacts Latino Health

Abstract

This manuscript examines how personally knowing a deportee and/or undocumented immigrant affects the mental health of Latina/o adults. Utilizing a new survey sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico (n=1,493), we estimate a series of logistic regressions to understand how personal connections to immigrants are affecting the mental health of Latinos using stress process theory. Our modeling approach takes into consideration the socio-political, familial, cultural, and personal contexts that make up the Latina/o experience, which is widely overlooked in data-sets that treat Latinos as a homogeneous ethnic group. Our findings suggest that knowing a deportee increases the odds of having to seek help for mental health problems. The significance of this work has tremendous implications for policy makers, health service providers, and researchers interested in reducing health disparities among minority populations especially under a new administration, which has adopted more punitive immigration policies and enforcement.

Keywords: Latino populations; deportations; health disparities; mental health; survey research.

Figure 1. Adjusted Predicted Probabilities of Logistic Regression Model of Latinos Personal Connections to Immigrants on Intent to Seek Help for Mental Health Problems: 2015 RWJF/Latino Decisions Latino National Health and Immigration Survey (n=1,294)

Note. Controlling for Education, Age, Income, Gender, Citizenship, Mexican Origin, Language of Interview, Discrimination, Marital Status, insurance coverage,, state fixed effects, and complex survey weights (all of which were set to their mean or mode values). *P < 0.01 for the difference between not knowing a deportee versus knowing a deportee and knowing an undocumented immigrant.

Figure 2. Adjusted Predicted Probabilities of Logistic Regression Model of the Number of Deportees Known on Intent to Seek Help for Mental Health Problems, 2015 RWJF/Latino Decisions Latino National Health and Immigration Survey (n=1,295)

Note. Controlling for Education, Age, Income, Gender, Citizenship, Mexican Origin, Language of Interview, Discrimination, Marital Status,, insurance coverage, state fixed effects, and complex survey weights (all of which were set to their mean or mode values). *P < 0.01 for the difference between not knowing a deportee versus knowing 3 or more deportees. †P < 0.05 for the difference between not knowing a deportee versus knowing 1–2 deportees.