Migrants often face a variety of health challenges in their host countries, depending on the circumstances of their migration and a host of obstacles such as language barriers, lack of knowledge about the health care system, lack of health insurance and fear of deportation.

During this pivotal election year, when immigration is a hot political topic, it’s important for journalists to help news consumers better understand the specific health challenges that immigrants and refugees encounter in the U.S. and humanize their stories to counter stereotypes, misconceptions and misinformation.

For instance, some states claim that immigrants, especially those who lack legal documentation, are a financial burden on the health care system. However, research suggests the opposite, showing that immigrants, particularly those who lack legal documentation, may subsidize the U.S. health care financing system.

“Immigrants’ substantial contributions to health care funding (despite their relatively low incomes) may be associated with their high labor force participation rate, particularly among men who have recently arrived in the US. Hence, they and their employers (whose benefit payments are widely considered part of the employee’s earned compensation) contribute to health insurance premiums as well as payroll and other taxes,” write the authors of a 2022 study published in JAMA Network Open, noting that “immigrants contributed $58.3 billion more in premiums and taxes in 2017 than insurers and government paid for their health care, and US-born citizens incurred a net deficit of $67.2 billion.”

Immigration is not an issue unique to the United States.

Today, more people than ever live in a country other than the one in which they were born, according to the United Nations. As of July 2020, there were an estimated 281 million international migrants, making up 3.5% of the global population. That’s compared with 2.8% in 2000 and 2.3% in 1980, according to the UN.

In 2022, there were 21.2 million noncitizen immigrants in the U.S., accounting for roughly 7% of the country’s population, according to a June 2024 policy brief by the Kaiser Family Foundation, now called KFF. About 40% are people who lack the legal documents needed to stay in the country.

Immigrant health is strongly shaped by the social, economic and political conditions of their host country, write Michael D. Stein and Sandro Galea in the 2020 book “Pained: Uncomfortable Conversations about the Public’s Health.”

“Legal status in the host country, for example, is associated with access to a broad range of health services and resultant better health,” they write. “Perhaps unsurprisingly, aggressive anti-immigration policies create poor health for the population they target. For example, family separation and detention at our borders traumatize families, deepening the mental health needs of this vulnerable group.”

In addition, as we explain below, research shows many immigrants and refugees experience traumatic events before, during and after their migration, which can lead to mental health problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety.

Children and pregnant women often face challenges in accessing pediatric and prenatal care. There is also research on the health risks associated with the types of jobs that immigrants and refugees hold.

But first, a primer on terminology and level of access to health care based on immigration status:

Immigrants, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers

The terms “refugee,” “asylum seeker” and “immigrant” are often used in discussions about people moving from one country to another, but they have distinct meanings based on the reasons for their move and individuals’ legal status.

Immigrant

An immigrant is a person who makes the decision to leave their home country and moves to another country with the intention of settling there, according to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid nongovernmental organization.

Immigrants move for various reasons, including economic opportunities, family reunification or a desire for a change in lifestyle. Unlike refugees or asylum seekers, immigrants do not typically flee persecution or immediate life-threatening situations. Their move can be either permanent or temporary, and they may go through legal channels to obtain residency rights, work permits or citizenship in the host country.

The AP Stylebook says immigrant, “rather than migrants, is most commonly used for people established in the U.S., which usually is their final destination. It also is used when another specific country is the final destination.”

Migrant

There’s no internationally accepted legal definition for the term ‘migrant.’ But the term generally refers to people who are staying outside of their home country and are not asylum seekers or refugees, according to Amnesty International, a global non-governmental organization focused on human rights.

“While dictionary definitions sometimes distinguish ‘immigrants’ — people who are, or intend to be, settled in their new country — from ‘migrants’ who are temporarily resident, ‘immigrant’ and ‘migrant’ (as well as ‘foreigner’) are often used interchangeably in public debate and even among research specialists,” according to The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.

The UN defines an international migrant as any person who has changed their country of residence, regardless of legal status or the nature and motive of their move.

The AP Stylebook says the term also “may be used for those whose reason for leaving their home country is not clear, or to cover people who may also be refugees or asylum-seekers.”

Refugee

A refugee is forced to leave their country to escape war, persecution or natural disaster. Refugees have a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Many have been forced to flee with little more than the clothes on their back, according to the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR, formerly the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Today, there are 43.4 million refugees around the world.

People go through a process known as refugee status determination in their host country to establish whether their circumstances make them refugees, according to the UN Refugee Agency.

Refugees have a right to international protection, according to Amnesty International. Those rights and protections include the right not to be expelled from their host country, the right to non-discrimination, the right to housing, education and work, according to the UN Refugee Agency.

To become a refugee in the United States, a person has to apply for protection while outside the U.S., while to become an asylum seeker, the application for protection must be submitted from inside the U.S. or at the border, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan policy and research organization. 

Asylum Seeker

An asylum seeker is someone who is seeking international protection from persecution and serious human rights violations in their home country, according to the UN Refugee Agency and Amnesty International. Their request for refugee status, or complementary protection status, has yet to be processed, or they may not yet have requested asylum but they intend to.

“Seeking asylum is a human right. This means everyone should be allowed to enter another country to seek asylum,” according to Amnesty International.

The length and outcome of this process can vary greatly depending on the laws of the host country and the specifics of the individual’s case. Not all asylum seekers will be found to be refugees, but all refugees were once asylum seekers, according to the UN Refugee Agency.

According to the AP Stylebook, “Asylum, under U.S. and international law, is permission granted to refugees to remain within the country to which they have fled. It is not intended for people leaving for economic reasons.” In addition, “In the United States, people fleeing their home countries who do not qualify for asylum may be eligible for ‘withholding of removal’ or the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which offer similar protections.”

“People who are likely to be asylum-seekers or refugees should not be referred to as migrants,” according to the UN Refugee Agency. “To do so can undermine the legal protections afforded to refugees under international law.”

Asylee

Journalists may come across the term “asylee,” referring to a person who has been granted asylum, but the AP Stylebook recommends against using the word. “We would say she was granted asylum,” according to the Stylebook.

Illegal immigration

The term refers to “entering or living in a country without authorization in violation of civil or criminal law,” according to AP Stylebook. Except in direct quotations, use “illegal” only to refer to an action, not a person, the Stylebook advises: “’illegal immigration’ but not ‘illegal immigrant’.”

Also, “do not use the terms alien, unauthorized immigrant, irregular migrant, an illegal, illegals or undocumented (except when quoting people or government documents that use these terms),” according to the AP Stylebook.

Access to U.S. health care based on immigration status

Health and health care access issues are not the same for all noncitizen immigrants. In the U.S., health care coverage of immigrants is based on their immigration status, as defined by the federal government. This HealthCare.gov page defines the terminology and coverage options.

Immigrants who are lawfully in the U.S. have a five-year waiting period to enroll in Medicaid, a government program primarily serving people with low incomes, or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). CHIP is a state-federal insurance program that provides low-cost health coverage to children in families that earn too much money to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to buy private insurance. In some states, CHIP covers pregnant women, according to HealthCare.gov.

Migrants who lack legal documentation to stay in the country can’t enroll in any federally-funded coverage, including Medicaid, CHIP, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act marketplace, according to KFF.

Refugees and those granted asylum seeker status don’t have to wait five years before enrolling in Medicaid and CHIP, according to HealthCare.gov. Others, including asylum seekers who haven’t been granted asylum status don’t qualify for Medicaid or CHIP, according to KFF.

But some states have tried to close the health coverage gap, especially for children and pregnant people.

So far, 22 states have extended insurance coverage to pregnant people regardless of immigration status through CHIP, according to KFF. Ten states — California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington — offer extended postpartum coverage for a year regardless of immigration status.

Meanwhile, 35 states, plus D.C., provide Medicaid coverage to children and pregnant people who are in the U.S. legally, without the five-year waiting period, according to HealthCare.gov

As of June 2024, 12 states — California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Washington — and D.C. cover children through CHIP regardless of immigration status, according to KFF.

The National Immigration Law Center also has maps of states that provide health coverage to immigrant children and pregnant people and a state-by-state list of medical assistance programs available to immigrants.

Six states — California, Colorado, Illinois, New York, Oregon, Washington — plus D.C. have expanded coverage to adults regardless of immigration status, as long as they fall within Medicaid’s income criteria.

In May 2024, the Biden Administration published a new regulation that will include individuals with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status as lawfully present in the U.S., so that they will be eligible to gain insurance coverage through the ACA Marketplace, starting this November.

“From a social justice standpoint, we really see legal status as a social determinant of health,” said Dr. Alan Shapiro, during a panel on covering immigrants at the Association of Health Care Journalists’ annual conference in New York City in June. Shapiro is the co-founder and chief strategy officer of Terra Firma National, which provides a range of services to immigrant families.

In a 2023 KFF report based on a joint survey with the LA Times, including 3,358 immigrants 18 years and older, nearly 80% said that they were in good to excellent health, while 20% reported being in fair or poor health. Nearly one in five of those with household incomes below $40,000 per year reported a health condition that required ongoing treatment, compared with about one in ten of those with higher incomes.

“Although most immigrants are healthy and employed, many face challenges to accessing and using health care in the U.S. due to higher uninsured rates, affordability challenges, linguistic and cultural barriers, and immigration-related fears, which has negative implications for their health and financial security,” according to the survey.

Advice for journalists

At the recent AHCJ panel on covering immigration, experts advised journalists to remind their audiences that many people leave their home countries out of necessity for survival.

“Cover migration differently than it’s been covered,” said Shapiro, who is also an assistant professor of pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “I don’t think there’s enough talk about the country conditions and what children and families are really struggling with in their home countries, and I think if the public knew more about how terrible life is for children and families there, and how little protection there is, there would be a lot more empathy and sympathy for [them].”

Dr. Laura Vargas, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado’s Institute of Behavioral Science, who has spent much time speaking to migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border advised journalists to explain the flow of firearms from the U.S. to Latin American countries, a trend that has fueled violence in the region. She has published several studies on the health and mental health of immigrants from Latin America.

“Firearms facilitate the criminal gangs, who are sometimes outgunning the police force and other local law enforcement,” said Vargas. “There’s rampant criminal activity in terms of extortion, robberies, territorial disputes among criminal gangs.”

Those conditions create instability for families and affect the health and mental health of adults and children.

“There’s a lack of future for children and families,” she said. “There’s no employment, and if you graduate with a degree, there’s no job available for you.”

It’s also critical that journalists build trust with the communities they’re covering. At Documented, a nonprofit news site devoted to covering New York City’s immigrants and policies that affect their lives, the staff created a WhatsApp channel to connect with migrants and asylum seekers after learning that the app was the main source of information and communication for them, said Rommel Ojeda, a bilingual journalist, filmmaker and a community correspondent for Documented.

The channel, which has more than 6,000 members, prioritizes privacy by masking phone numbers and offers anonymity to people who agree to be interviewed.

“All of that is to say that we were able to build trust and the trust gave us access so that we can report better,” said Ojeda. “And when I say we can report better, it’s because we can go into the community and really ask for the nuances of each individual who’s talking to us.”

Research roundup

Insurance and Health Care Outcomes in Regions Where Undocumented Children Are Medicaid-Eligible
Julia Rosenberg, Veronika Shabanova, Sarah McCollum and Mona Sharifi. Pediatrics, September 2022.

The study: The study investigates the impact of expanded Medicaid eligibility on children in immigrant families and children who are not in immigrant families. The researchers uses data from the 2019 National Survey of Children’s Health, a nationally representative cross-sectional survey, to compare health care outcomes in states that provide Medicaid eligibility to children regardless of their documentation status (“extended-eligibility states”) with the states that don’t (“nonextended-eligibility states”). There were six extended-eligibility states plus Washington, D.C., at the time of the study. The primary aim was to assess how residing in these different regions affects the rates of uninsured people and health care use among children.

The findings:

• Children in extended-eligibility states had a significantly lower rate of being uninsured (3.7%) compared with those in states that didn’t offer extended eligibility (7.5%).
• Children in immigrant families were more likely to be uninsured compared to those who were not from immigrant families, even if they lived in an extended-eligibility state.
• Children in extended-eligibility states were less likely to forgo medical care (2.2% compared with 3.1%) and dental care (17.1% compared with 20.5%) compared with those in states that didn’t offer extended eligibility.
• There were similar rates of emergency department visits between children in extended- and nonextended-eligibility states.

The takeaway: The study highlights that expanding public health insurance eligibility to all children, regardless of documentation status, is associated with lower rates of being uninsured. “This builds upon the evidence that policies which expand insurance access can improve enrollment within and beyond the target expansion demographic through a ‘welcome mat’ effect,” the authors write. The findings also suggest that states with restrictive health insurance policies for migrant children who lack legal documents to stay in the country may face higher rates of being uninsured and poorer health care use, impacting long-term health and social equity, they add.

Companion commentary: Children in Immigrant Families Deserve Health Care, by Fernando S. Mendoza et al., published in the journal Pediatrics in August 2022.

California’s Health4All Kids Expansion And Health Insurance Coverage Among Low-Income Noncitizen Children
Brandy J. Lipton, Jefferson Nguyen and Melody K. Schiaffino. Health Affairs, July 2021.

The study: Implemented in May 2016, California’s Health4AllKids expanded Medicaid eligibility to all low-income children regardless of their immigration status. The research uses data from the 2012 to 2018 American Community Survey to evaluate the impact of this expansion on health insurance coverage rates among noncitizen children in California compared with eleven states (Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Washington) plus Washington, D.C.

The findings:

• The rate of noncitizen children lacking health insurance coverage dropped by 34%, translating to a 9 percentage-point increase in any coverage and a 12 percentage-point increase in Medicaid coverage.
• Before the expansion, noncitizen children were significantly less likely to have health insurance compared with citizen children. The Health4All Kids program effectively reduced this disparity by more than half, showcasing the impact of inclusive health policies.
• The study found no significant evidence of a substantial shift from private to public insurance coverage, indicating that the expansion primarily reduced the uninsured rates rather than substituting one form of coverage for another.

The takeaway: “Our analysis provides some of the first evidence on the effects of expanding Medicaid and CHIP to undocumented children. Findings suggest that these policies have the potential to reduce coverage disparities by immigration status,” the authors write.

Publicly-Funded Services Providing Sexual, Reproductive, and Maternal Healthcare to Immigrant Women in the United States: A Systematic Review
Tanvi Jain, Jessica LaHote, Goleen Samari and Samantha Garbers. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, June 2022.

The study: The authors review published research about the availability and impact of publicly funded sexual, reproductive and maternal health services on immigrant women in the U.S. The review examines nine studies published from December 2007 to August 2020, focusing on the use of services such as Medicaid, CHIP, and other federally or state-funded programs, particularly among Latina immigrants.

The findings:

• Immigrant women, especially those who lack legal documentation to stay in the country or with low income and education, had higher rates of adequate prenatal care when they had access to Medicaid or CHIP. Six of the nine studies reviewed indicated improved prenatal care adequacy due to access to these programs.
• Immigrant women faced significant barriers to accessing sexual, reproductive, and maternal health services, including cost, language barriers, fear of deportation and lack of knowledge about available services. These barriers often led to delayed or inadequate prenatal care, which can result in severe health outcomes.
• Policies like the “public charge” rule negatively impacted immigrant women’s access to sexual, reproductive, and maternal health services, with many avoiding enrollment in Medicaid due to fear of jeopardizing their immigration status. This led to later initiation of prenatal care and fewer prenatal visits. Public charge is a federal law that determines if a non-citizen applying for a visa or permanent residence is likely to rely on the government for support in the future.

The takeaway: The study underscores the importance of inclusive and comprehensive publicly-funded sexual, reproductive, and maternal health services for immigrant women in the United States. Access to Medicaid and CHIP significantly improves prenatal care adequacy, but numerous barriers still prevent many immigrant women from using those services. Anti-immigrant policies exacerbate challenges, leading to poorer health outcomes. “Similar to women born in the US, immigrant women with low income and educational attainment would most benefit from publicly-funded programming,” the authors write.

More on research funding: Funding for Refugee Health Research From the National Institutes of Health Between 2000 and 2020 by Mehak Kaur, Lana Bridi and Dahlia Kaki, published in JAMA Network Open in January 2024.

The Health of Undocumented Latinx Immigrants: What We Know and Future Directions
India J. Ornelas, Thespina J. Yamanis and Raymond A. Ruiz. Annual Review of Public Health, April 2020.

The study: The authors aim to explore the health outcomes and determinants for Latino migrants who lack legal documentation to stay in the country. The study highlights the social, political and economic factors that impact their health and identifies gaps in current research.

The findings:

• Social and political factors significantly influence the health of migrants who lack legal documentation to be in the country. Factors vary across different stages of migration and are influenced by the immigrants’ country of origin, how they entered the U.S., and changes in their legal and health status over time.
• The study notes that conducting research with migrants who lack legal documentation is challenging due to their precarious living conditions, unstable employment, frequent changes in contact information, and low literacy levels. However, strategies like conducting research at community-based organizations and using social media for communication can help overcome those challenges.

The takeaway: “Public health practitioners can continue to support and advocate for programs and policies that create healthful social and political environments for undocumented Latinx immigrants,” the authors write. They also call for additional research.

Delve deeper: Traumatic Experiences and Place of Occurrence: An Analysis of Sex Differences Among a Sample of Recently Arrived Immigrant Adults from Latin America, by Laura X. Vargas, et al., published in PLOS One in June 2024.

US Immigration Policy Stressors and Latinx Youth Mental Health
Kathleen M. Roche, Rebecca M. B. White and Roushanac Partovi. JAMA Pediatrics, May 2024.

The study: The authors investigate how immigration-related stressors affect parent-child relationships and the subsequent mental health of Latino adolescents. The study includes adolescent-mother duos surveyed at three different time points over four years — 2018, 2020, and 2022, conducted in a suburban Atlanta, Georgia, school district, involving Latino adolescents aged 11 to 16 years.

The findings:

• Immigration-related stressors, such as mothers’ anti-immigrant worries and adolescents’ experiences of family member detention or deportation, were linked to disruptions in parent-child relationships.
• Specifically, anti-immigrant worry was associated with increased parent-child conflict, leading to higher odds of symptoms such as aggression and impulsivity in adolescents.
• For girls, family member detention or deportation led to reduced parental support, which in turn was linked to increased depression and anxiety.

The takeaway: “Our research signals the need for school personnel to address stressors faced by Latinx students and families and for health care institutions to advocate for policies expanding access to affordable, culturally competent mental health services, including for children of immigrants. Congress and both state and local lawmakers have the power to enact policies that reduce risks faced by children in immigrant families. Inclusive immigration policies prioritizing the best interests of children and their families may help protect the mental health of this country’s Latinx youth, the vast majority of whom are US citizens,” the authors write.

Additional reading

• Assessment of Immigrants’ Premium and Tax Payments for Health Care and the Costs of Their Care
  Mark J. Ommerborn, et al. JAMA Network Open, November 2022.
• Health and Health Care Experiences of Immigrants: The 2023 KFF/LA Times Survey of Immigrants
  Drishti. Pillai, et al. KFF, September 2023.
• Medical Care for Newly Arrived Displaced Persons
  Radhika Jain, Geren S. Stone and Matthew G. Gartland. NEJM Evidence, October 2023.
• State-Level Anti-Immigrant Sentiment and Policies and Health Risks in US Latino Children
  Natalie Slopen, et al. Pediatrics, August 2023.
• Understanding the Role of Immigration Status in U.S. Health Coverage: From Barriers to Pathways
  Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, November 2023.
• Living in an Immigrant Family in America: How Fear and Toxic Stress are Affecting Daily Life, Well-Being, & Health
  Samantha Artiga and Petry Ubri. KFF, December 2017.
• The Mental Health of Migrants Living in Limbo: A Mixed-Methods Systematic Review with Meta-Analysis
• Marianne Côté-Olijnyk, J. Christopher Perry, Marie-Ève Paré and Rachel Kronick. Psychiatry Research, July 2024.
• Immigrant and Refugee Health Curricula in US-Based Medical Training: A Scoping Review to Inform Integration Into Pediatric Residency Programs
  Lisa Gantz et al. Academic Pediatrics, July 2024.
• The Impact of Detention on the Health of Asylum Seekers: An Updated Systematic Review: A Systematic Review
  Trine Filges, Elizabeth Bengtsen, Edith Montgomery and Malene Wallach Kildemoes. Campbell Systematic Reviews, July 2024.
• Migrants Come to the U.S. with Trauma. A Broken Mental Health System Adds Stress.
  Anika Nayak and Divya K. Chhabra. Harvard Public Health, February 2024.
• The Health Coverage of Noncitizens in the United States, 2024
  Matthew Buettgens and Urmi Ramchandani. Urban Institute, May 2023.
• 7 Ways to Inform News Coverage of the Southern US Border The Journalist’s Resource, January 2023.

Additional resources

Migration Policy Institute

• This primer on U.S. public benefits (including health care) is a useful resource in sifting through immigrant eligibility by program as well as immigrant legal status.
• The State Immigration Data Profiles have a wealth of data on the immigrant population in the U.S. and state levels, including health insurance coverage for immigrants and U.S.-born overall and by U.S. citizenship status.
• This data tool that looks just at the unauthorized segment of the immigrant population at U.S., state, and top county levels.

Protecting Immigrant Families

Human Rights Watch: Refugees and Migrants

American Immigration Council

ACLU: Immigrants’ Rights

Conscious Style Guide: Ethnicity, Race + Nationality

The post How migrants, asylum seekers and refugees seek health care in the US: A primer and research roundup appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

New York Times investigative reporter Hannah Dreier wanted to know what happened to the hundreds of thousands of migrant children who came to the U.S. alone in recent years through the country’s southern border. Most sought to escape extreme poverty in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

In her five-part series, “Alone and Exploited,” Dreier demonstrates how a long chain of government failures and willful ignorance allowed this “new economy of exploitation” to grow and thrive.

“This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century,” she writes in the first story in the series, published in February 2023.

“Companies ignore the young faces in their back rooms and on their factory floors. Schools often decline to report apparent labor violations, believing it will hurt children more than help. And [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] behaves as if the migrant children who melt unseen into the country are doing just fine.”

The series also reveals:

• More than 250,000 migrant children arrived alone in the U.S. in 2021 and 2022, a sharp increase over prior years. As emergency shelters ran out of room, the federal government pressed case managers to work faster to place kids in private homes and loosened some restrictions to make vetting sponsors easier.
• The U.S. government lost track of many migrant children shortly after they left the shelters. “While H.H.S. [the Department of Health and Human Services] checks on all minors by calling them a month after they begin living with their sponsors, data obtained by The Times showed that over the last two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children,” Dreier writes in the first story in the series. “Overall, the agency lost immediate contact with a third of migrant children.”
• Federal officials missed or overlooked warnings signs about child labor violations, including reports from social workers about dangerous working conditions and reports from the U.S. Department of Labor outlining evidence of child labor trafficking.
• Private audits ordered by several big companies consistently missed child labor violations. “Children were overlooked by auditors who were moving quickly, leaving early or simply not sent to the part of the supply chain where minors were working, The Times found in audits performed at 20 production facilities used by some of the nation’s most recognizable brands,” Dreier writes in the last article in the series, published in December 2023.

Federal and state officials responded quickly to Dreier’s reporting by changing laws, strengthening programs and overhauling some federal agencies. Days after the first story ran, President Joe Biden’s administration announced a crackdown on child labor exploitation. Congress and the Department of Labor launched their own investigations.

Meanwhile, many major companies, including McDonald’s, Costco and PepsiCo, announced their own reforms aimed eliminating child labor across their supply chains, Dreier reported in February 2024.

I interviewed Dreier to learn more about her series and the database she created to ground her coverage. Dreier, who is on maternity leave, answered my five questions by email.

In the short Q&A below, she discusses the database, which contains key details the federal government collected on more than 550,000 migrant children from January 2015 through May 2023, and why The New York Times chose to make it public. Dreier also offers tips to help other journalists use the anonymized data to report on migrant children and labor issues in their states and communities.

Her responses have been lightly edited to match The Journalist’s Resource’s editorial style.

Denise-Marie Ordway: Why did you create this database and how did it help you report out the series?

Hannah Dreier: This was a story that focused on people and on-the-ground reporting, but it started with data. I started out in early 2022 with a question: What happened to the hundreds of thousands of young people who were crossing the southern border by themselves?

I knew from years of immigration reporting that some of these children ended up working industrial jobs. But little was known about the startling scope of child labor throughout the United States, or the industry and governmental failures that have allowed it to thrive.

My first, and largest, hurdle was figuring out how to find children in this hidden workforce. The government provides shelter to children when they arrive, but after releasing them to sponsors, it doesn’t track them further. To find where children were working, I had to develop a new approach to analyzing federal data.

I quickly realized that children released to distant relatives and strangers were the most likely to be put to work. So I filed multiple FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests with the Department of Health and Human Services — and eventually sued them in federal court. I was able to obtain ZIP code-level data showing where children had been released to these nonparent sponsors. I then overlaid this data with U.S. Census population-density data to pinpoint parts of the country with especially high concentrations of children living far from their close relatives.

The resulting database guided two years of reporting across 13 states.

The data pointed to spots I never would have thought of: Flandreau, South Dakota; Parksley, Virginia; Bozeman, Montana. I started visiting these towns for weeks at a time, embedding in schools, and accompanying families to weddings and quinceañeras. I sat in factory parking lots during the midnight shift change and waited outside day labor sites before dawn. I found town after town where migrant child labor was an open secret.

Ordway: What made you decide to make this data public? Should more journalists and news outlets do this?

Dreier: Yes! And I hope more reporters use this data to dig into migrant child labor in America.

After I wrote a Times Insider piece explaining my process for mapping migrant child labor, Congressional staffers, academics, other journalists and even Department of Labor investigators requested access to our database. As part of its commitment to exposing the full scope of child labor, The Times made this data public, along with a detailed map that outlined outcomes for more than 550,000 children over a period of eight years.

We found migrant child labor in all 50 states. It’s clear there’s more to this story than what one journalist or even a team of reporters can report.

Ordway: How do you recommend other journalists use this database?

Dreier: Journalists at different outlets around the country have already picked up on some child labor stories, and this data can help them tell new stories. For local reporters, the database provides a previously unavailable level of detail about migrant children, including where kids are coming from, how long they’re staying in government-run shelters, and what kind of relationships they have with their sponsors (if they’re being released to aunts and uncles, distant cousins, strangers, etc.).

It’s been great to see reporters starting to use the database to fuel their own reporting, including at The Cincinnati Enquirer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Ordway: What advice would you give other journalists who’d like to create databases for their own reporting projects?

Dreier: Though the heart of this reporting was the stories of the children themselves, I used data to add sweep and bring home to readers just how widespread this problem has become.

We found useful data everywhere. It doesn’t always take a federal lawsuit to shake it loose. We used court records from PACER [the federal Public Access to Court Electronic Records system] and state courts, as well as documents from dozens of FOIA requests to the Department of Labor and state labor agencies to hunt down outcomes the government does not track.

We built a database of migrant children killed on the job, including a 15-year-old who fell on his first day roofing and a 14-year-old who was hit by a car while delivering food.

Another database showed how rarely the government prosecuted child labor trafficking cases. I also tracked serious workplace injuries suffered by children, including crushed limbs and seared lungs.

A lot of data is sitting there for the taking, and doesn’t require submitting any requests at all. I’d encourage reporters to spend time on the websites of the agencies they’re reporting on — for me, that was OSHA [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration], DOL [the Department of Labor], HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services], SEC [the Securities and Exchange Commission], and CBP [Customs and Border Protection].

I also found it helpful to try site searches of these websites (by adding “site:hhs.gov” to Google searches for example), and to add the search term .csv or .xlsx, because some databases are posted to the site but not listed anywhere.

Ordway: When you ask government agencies for data such as this, how do you make sure you receive it in a form that you can easily use for reporting purposes?

Dreier: I always ask FOIA officers to email me records and to send data as a spreadsheet, but government offices often ignore that request.

With this project, some state agencies and police departments would send records only in hard copy or on CDs.

HHS gave us thousands of rows of data in the form of poorly rendered PDFs. We resolved this issue by scanning hundreds of pages of documents, and then using online tools to convert them to searchable text and spreadsheets.

For me, the most important thing is to get the records. From there, it’s almost always possible to find some way to make them useable … even if it ends up being a time-consuming process.

Read the stories

Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.

As Migrant Children Were Put to Work, U.S. Ignored Warnings

The Kids on the Night Shift

Children Risk Their Lives Building America’s Roofs

They’re Paid Billions to Root Out Child Labor in the U.S. Why Do They Fail?

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It is worthwhile for any journalist covering U.S. public policy to become familiar with the data work of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, housed at Syracuse University.

TRAC is best known for, and most often used for, its immigration data, most of which is available to the public free of charge and simpler to access than going to government agencies directly. The organization also gathers and disseminates data related to enforcement, prosecutions and other actions taken by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service.

TRAC is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, primarily grant-funded data organization established in 1989 that is affiliated with the Newhouse School of Public Communications and the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse. Data that TRAC has gathered and made public has recently been used in stories produced by a variety of news media organizations, including Fox News, the Associated Press and various local outlets.

The guiding principle at TRAC is to increase government transparency and accountability, says TRAC researcher Austin Kocher, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who has a doctorate in geography.

Executing on that principle involves gathering information from opaque agencies at the heart of U.S. immigration policy and other topics.

“The fact that we’re known for immigration is sort of secondary to the fact that we’re interested in transparency,” says Kocher.

TRAC staff use Freedom of Information Act requests to gather data from the federal government. The aim of TRAC’s data gathering is to understand how government processes work, who is affected and how they are affected. The organization is particularly interested in areas of the U.S. government — agencies, departments, offices — that do not make data readily available to the public.

Echoing the journalistic investigative process, TRAC staff determine which agencies to ask for public records, and ways to ask for that information, in part by examining what officials say in Congressional testimony and other public settings, to assess whether there are fuller datasets informing those statements which could be worth querying.

TRAC also produces in-depth reports throughout the year. The data gathering and deep-dive reports represent an amalgam of the journalistic and analytical approaches of TRAC’s directors and founders: Susan Long, a statistician and associate professor at Syracuse University, and David Burnham, a former New York Times reporter and also an associate professor at Syracuse who has covered local, state and federal enforcement issues since 1966.

“We really have built into our ethos a profound respect and admiration for the work of journalists,” Kocher says.

Long, Kocher and other staff use statistical techniques to check and verify raw data before releasing that information via free interactive tools and written reports. Detailed information on federal civil and criminal court activities is available for a fee, though public reports are often comprehensive enough for journalists to offer context and perspective. Brief essays on the histories of the agencies that TRAC’s focus on offer useful background for journalists covering those topics.

TRAC: Where to start

There are many ways to explore TRAC data, but the sheer amount of information may be daunting for first-time users. Start with TRAC Immigration Tools for quick facts on immigration detention and immigration courts, as well as current and historical data on border patrol arrests, immigrant detention facilities, asylum filings and backlogs, and U.S. code relevant to immigration.

Among other data, users can organize immigration court proceedings going back to the 1990s by charge type, immigrant nationality and the percent of immigrants allowed to stay in the U.S. by court location. County-level maps of pending immigration court cases illustrate the distribution of immigration proceedings around the country. All data are aggregate and individual immigrants are not identifiable.

TRAC also offers a primer on how to use its immigration data tools, as well as comprehensive detail on the agencies involved in immigration processes, their roles, responsibilities and interactions. Kocher has also posted on Twitter an overview of immigration-related data available for free through TRAC.

Due to time constraints, the TRAC team can’t offer one-on-one introductory walkthroughs of how to access its data. But Kocher says he can give quick help to journalists pursuing specific stories, pointing them toward data that can provide context for audiences or other avenues of investigation. And, he says, he is willing to provide more detailed responses once a relationship with a journalist is established.

“I’ve learned the hard way that the academic timeline is months, if not years, to publication and for journalists it’s 24 hours,” Kocher says. “I have gotten over the hump and I now say, ‘If we have a working relationship, I will respond immediately to you.’”

Deeper analyses that require a day or more of work are usually limited to paying subscribers.

But there are trends in the free immigration data that can spur story ideas.

Story ideas

As an example of a story waiting to be told, Kocher points to recent increases in asylum seekers in the U.S. from Nepal. The numbers of Nepalese asylum seekers remain small compared with the number of migrants arriving at the southern border, but there may be stories to explore given the recent uptick.

Another story idea: TRAC data include the primary language that asylum seekers use. Spanish sign language is among them. What unique challenges are faced by asylum seekers who use Spanish sign language?

From a 2021 TRAC report:

“Contrary to popular misconceptions, ‘sign language’ is not a universal language. Similar to spoken languages, sign languages in use among Deaf and Hard of Hearing communities have their own linguistic histories and regional variations that may not map onto the spoken language of the region. What the courts list as Spanish Sign Language, therefore, may not necessarily represent one single language community, but many language communities.”

Design improvements across the site that will make the data easier to explore are slated to roll out over the coming year, Kocher says. And in late February, keep an eye out for TRAC reports on new data that will reveal what is happening with enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border and outcomes of Biden administration immigration policies.

The post Need US government data? Get to know TRAC at Syracuse University appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Reporters who cover immigration know it is a beat that intersects almost every other beat — economics, education, health, culture, national security and even sports.

The story of people moving across national borders has been told throughout human history. It bubbles up to the nation’s attention at certain moments, often when elected officials debate or disagree on immigration issues or policies, and it becomes a political story.

Recently, the national story of immigration at the southern U.S. border has focused on Title 42, which gives the U.S. Surgeon General the authority to prevent people from entering the U.S. for public health reasons, such as the presence of a communicable disease in another country. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention invoked Title 42 in March 2020, shortly after COVID-19 reached the U.S. — the first time since the authority was made law during World War II that it had been extensively used.

U.S. authorities have since used Title 42 to expel nearly 2.5 million migrants at the southern border, compared with roughly 1,300 expulsions at the northern border. President Joe Biden’s administration has continued to use Title 42 for expulsions, while broadening pathways for migrants to legally stay in the U.S.

The current status of Title 42 is complicated. The Biden administration intended to rescind Title 42 in mid-2022, but in December the Supreme Court allowed those border restrictions to continue at the request of Republican attorneys general in 19 states. The back-and-forth over Title 42, across presidential administrations and through the courts, is indicative of the human, political and legal complexities related to movement across borders.

To help new and experienced journalists alike cover the breadth and depth of the story of immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, we reached out to five people who know a lot about how the system works. They have studied immigration as academics, served as legal counsel for migrants, or reported on immigration:

• Leah Boustan, a professor of economics at Princeton University and co-author of the 2022 book, “Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success.”
• Linda Dakin-Grimm, an attorney who has served as pro bono counsel in dozens of immigration proceedings since 2016.
• Camilo Montoya-Galvez, the immigration reporter for CBS News.
• Robert Tsai, a professor of law at Boston University who has written on the history of immigration law in the U.S. during the 20^th century.
• Mariely Valentin-Llopis, an adjunct lecturer at Florida International University and author of the 2021 book, “Reporting Immigration Conflict: Opportunities for Peace Journalism.”

Here’s what they said.

1. Seek a firm foundation of knowledge on U.S. immigration.

Whether you are a journalist assigned an immigration story or a reporter dedicated to the immigration beat, “you’ve got to ground yourself in something before you can tell a story,” Dakin-Grimm says.

Appendix II of Dakin-Grimm’s 2020 book, “Dignity and Justice: Welcoming the Stranger at Our Border,” is a comprehensive overview of the U.S. immigration system. It explains the federal agencies involved, paths to citizenship and important definitions, such as the difference between an asylum seeker and refugee.

3. Convey the lengthy and rich history of immigration to the U.S.

For most of the middle of the 20^th century, the story of immigration into the U.S. was not a news story for most American media outlets. New York Times national editor Jia Lyn Yang recounts why in the prologue of her 2020 book, “One Mighty and Irresistible Tide”:

“The country did not regard immigration as worthy of discussion because, quite simply, there were not many immigrants. A 1924 law passed by Congress had instituted a system of ethnic quotas so stringent that large-scale immigration was choked off for decades. The quotas aimed to limit not only the volume of people entering the country but the type. In order to keep America white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, the laws sharply curtailed immigration from southern and eastern Europe and outright banned people from nearly all of Asia. More immigrants entered the country in the first decade of the twentieth century than between 1931 and 1971.”

The nation’s strict federal immigration quotas were eliminated in 1965 with the Immigration and Nationality Act, a sometimes-forgotten pillar of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society domestic legislative agenda, which included the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“Not everyone thinks about that as one of the important civil rights laws,” Tsai says. “But at the time [Johnson] certainly did. And the same civil rights coalition that helped push through the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act also looked at immigration as an inequality question.”

The history of immigration in the U.S. is long and winding — it is why there are so many books on the topic — and details or broad strokes of that history may not be conducive to the goals of a single news story. Yet, context is often critical, Tsai says. For example, if a politically powerful person expresses a policy affinity toward strict immigration quotas, it would be relevant to remind readers about quota laws from past eras and the political and social situations that led to them.

This example, from the third chapter of Boustan’s book, co-written with Stanford economist Ran Abramitzky, is why past is prologue — why it is important to remind audiences how the nation arrived at this moment in the immigration debate:

“Another unintended consequence of Johnson’s sweeping immigration reform was the new attention paid to the category of undocumented immigration. The 1965 bill imposed entry quotas on Mexican and Canadian immigrants for the first time, setting the stage for more than fifty years of policy focus on illegal border crossings, primarily at the southern border. In the same year, Congress phased out the Bracero guest worker program, imagining that eliminating guest workers would preserve agricultural jobs for US-born workers. Yet, with the program shuttered, many of the same Mexican immigrants who had arrived a few years before on Bracero contracts crossed the border, except they were now reclassified as ‘illegal’ immigrants and thus had reason to stay in the United States rather than hazard more border crossings.”

Context can also take the form of data. For example, when it comes to undocumented immigration, visa overstays regularly and widely outpace the number of migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the Center for Migration Studies.

In a comprehensive explainer on Title 42 published in January 2023, Montoya-Galvez includes data covering two decades showing a spike in migrant apprehensions at the southern U.S. border after Title 42 was invoked in 2020. It is a clear and effective way to provide long-view historical context, showing the role that COVID border restrictions have had in the highest apprehension levels since the early 2000s.

“I don’t think any editor for a major mainstream outlet is looking for an essay on the historical context behind every immigration policy rollout,” says Montoya-Galvez. “But I do think there are ways that we can include some historical context that is, from our perspective, key to discussing any part of the system. For example, when we talk about any type of congressional proposal on immigration, I think it would be a disservice to any audience to not highlight that Congress has not been able to reform the system in any significant way since the 1990s.”

TRAC, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, is a reliable source for immigration data, including Department of Homeland Security enforcement numbers and immigration court backlogs, wait times and other information that can inform public understanding of the legal side of the system.

The Immigration History Calendar is a crowdsourced repository of notable dates and events throughout U.S. immigration history that is worth bookmarking. Scroll to the bottom of this article for more recommended reading and resources.

4. Note and explain the difference between law and policy.

In the immigration system, laws are rules and policies are how elected executors — state governors or U.S. presidents, for example — implement those rules. Policies can change when administrations change.

“Every president has the ability to affect how [federal] law is implemented in certain ways,” Dakin-Grimm says.

Federal policies that do not follow the law, or that interested parties think do not follow the law, often end up in federal court.

Laws are passed by legislatures — the U.S. Congress, for example — and are usually slower to change or update than policies. The Immigration Act of 1990, which raised the yearly number immigrants allowed into the country and prioritized highly skilled and educated workers, was the last time federal legislators took substantive action on immigration.

Dakin-Grimm recommends journalists remind audiences that policies, even those at the federal level with far-reaching consequences, may be tenuous in the long-term.

A straightforward example happened in late 2020, when Trump capped the number of refugees the U.S. would accept at 15,000 — a historically low number. Biden reversed course after he became president, upping the cap to 125,000.

A more complex example is Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA, which became DHS policy in June 2012 under a directive from then-President Barack Obama.

DACA has allowed people whose parents brought them to the U.S. as children, without legal documents, to legally work, attend college and receive health insurance without fear of deportation. Obama’s successor, President Donald Trump, announced in September 2017 that his administration would phase out DACA.

Lawsuits followed, and DACA’s fate lay with federal judges.

The Supreme Court in June 2020 prevented the Trump administration from ending DACA, with Chief Justice John Roberts stressing the court’s ruling was not based on the merits of the policy but rather that the administration failed to provide a “reasoned explanation” for its termination.

By January 2021, President Joe Biden formally reinstated DACA through an executive order. In October 2022, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen reaffirmed a previous ruling that the current version of DACA is illegal, preventing new applications but allowing those already approved to continue to be in the program.

The DACA saga is a reminder that policies can change, or be put in peril, with a pen stroke from a judge or elected official.

5. Observe how news media that report in other languages cover immigration.

News outlets that report primarily in a language other than English can offer a different fundamental perspective for journalists who report in English, says Valentin-Llopis.

That focus is a natural byproduct of the audiences that Spanish-language news media serve, but it is nonetheless food for thought for English-language outlets covering immigration in areas that also have large immigrant populations.

6. Think of immigration as an issue whose consequences reverberate across generations — like climate change.

Boustan and Abramitzky in their 2022 book write that “we need to design our immigration policy at the level of generations; the immigrants of today are the Americans of tomorrow.”

The scope of generations can be difficult to achieve in news coverage of a specific movement of people to and across borders, such as groups of Hondurans who moved northward toward the U.S. border in the late 2010s, in part because they were unable to survive on farmland made arid from climate change.

Boustan suggests that, in recent years, coverage of climate change itself has taken a grander view, widening the scope to consider the human and economic toll of a warming planet in the decades ahead. This expansive type of news coverage can be instructive in covering immigration as a generational issue. There is a big story, an “incredibly important existential story,” she says, beyond any particular movement of people.

For example, there are long-term demographic and labor issues at play, Boustan says. Which global economic powerhouse will have the people needed to do the work to keep its economy churning in the future? The population of China, for example, recently shrunk for the first time in over half a century. With people in advanced economies living longer than ever, which countries will have the labor force to provide the services and care that older populations need?

The framing of a story or series on the interplay between demographics and labor doesn’t necessarily have to revolve around a world-power-versus-world-power narrative, Boustan says. The core question is: Will there be enough workers to do the jobs that cannot be replaced by technology — care for older people, child care, and so on? With new arrivals to the U.S. a potential source to fill some of that labor demand, this is a question waiting for more journalistic insights.

7. Avoid horse race reporting about immigration.

Boustan and Abramitzky analyzed political speeches about immigration in the Congressional Record and find that prior to World War II, “Republican and Democratic representatives … were equally likely to give anti-immigration speeches.” Since then, they find that congressional speeches about immigration have become more pro-immigration on the whole, but also more polarized. They write in their book:

“From the types of words that representatives use in their speeches, it is clear that Republicans and Democrats view immigrants through different lenses. Republicans are increasingly likely to use words related to crime, illegality, and violence in their speeches about immigration, whereas Democrats use terms related to family and community.”

Valentin-Llopis suggests reporting that resembles horse race journalism — for example, focusing on the rhetorical back-and-forth among politicians — is overdone and ultimately not illuminating for audiences who want to understand the full scope of immigration issues. She further suggests there is a lack of coverage, and holding to account of, political leaders in countries in Central America and other regions where many immigrants to the U.S. have recently come from.

Holding politicians accountable includes noting their use of politicized terminology. Montoya-Galvez, in addition to reporting on the stories of immigrants, is also tasked with covering U.S. policy and politics around immigration. He advises taking care with the language that elected officials sometimes use: An “invasion” of migrants, for example. “Invasion,” he notes, has a precise definition unrelated to anything happening with migrants at the southern border.

Journalists should not ignore such language, since elected officials are “in positions of power,” Montoya-Galvez says. “But I do think there are ways that we can characterize their criticism, which is mainly that they believe the [presidential] administration has been too lenient on this issue. We can describe these policy disagreements without having to rely on these, in some ways, dehumanizing and not accurate criticisms of what’s happening.”

Recommended reading

Research

“Computational Analysis of 140 years of US Political Speeches reveals more positive but increasingly polarized Framing of Immigration.” Dallas Card, et. al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 2022.

“COVID-Related Restrictions on Entry into the United States under Title 42: Litigation and Legal Considerations.” Congressional Research Service, December 2020.

“Do Human Capital Decisions Respond to the Returns to Education? Evidence from DACA,” Elira Kuka, Na’ama Shenhav and Kevin Shih. American Economic Journal, February 2020.

“An Investigation of the Conceptualization of Peace and War in Peace Journalism Studies of Media Coverage of National and International Conflicts,” Valerie Gouse, Mariely Valentin-Llopis and Beryl Nyamwange. Media, War & Conflict, November 2018.

“Media Production in a Transnational Setting: Three Models of Immigrant Journalism,” Moses Shumow. Journalism, February 2014.

“Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America,” Douglas Massey and Karen Pren. Population Development Review, July 2012.

From The Journalist’s Resource

How the news media portray Latinos in stories and images: 5 studies to know. Aug. 8, 2020.

Mental health issues among immigrants: New research. Nov. 16, 2018.

Covering immigration: What reporters get wrong and how to get it right. July 24, 2018.

Books

Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success. Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan, 2022.

Reporting Immigration Conflict: Opportunities for Peace Journalism. Mariely Valentin-Llopis, 2021.

Dignity and Justice: Welcoming the Stranger at Our Border. Linda Dakin-Grimm, 2020.

The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. Greg Grandin, 2020.

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle over American Immigration, 1924-1965. Jia Lynn Yang, 2020.

Conflicted: Voices of Central American Migrants. Catalina Rodríguez Tapia, 2020.

Practical Equality: Forging Justice in a Divided Nation. Robert Tsai, 2019.

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Academic studies in recent decades have repeatedly shown that how the news media portray Latinos and other minority groups influences how the public feels about them and whether voters support policies designed to help them.

Research also indicates media coverage can affect how individuals see themselves and their place in society.

As journalists take on contentious national issues such as immigration, public education reform and neighborhood policing — issues that have a tremendous impact on Latinos, America’s largest minority group — it’s important they understand how their coverage can impact local communities.

Nearly one-fifth of people who live in the U.S. — 18.5% — identify as Latino or Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Meanwhile, more than half of the nation’s foreign-born population is from Latin America, Census Bureau estimates from 2018 show.

“The media’s choice of words and images shapes the way that people perceive and evaluate policies, particularly with respect to racialized issues,” write researchers Emily M. Farris of Texas Christian University and Heather Silber Mohamed of Clark University in an academic paper published in 2018. “The quantity and quality of press coverage also can influence the extent to which individuals both interpret and prioritize a given policy issue.”

In the months leading up to the 2020 presidential election, journalists can also turn to academic literature for ideas on improving their coverage of Latino voters, a voting bloc that grew by 121% from 2000 to 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. A Pew survey conducted earlier this year finds that many Latinos and others living in the U.S. believe the news media misunderstand them.

To get you started, here are five studies we think you’ll want to know about.

———-

Latinos in news images

Picturing Immigration: How the Media Criminalizes Immigrants
Emily M. Farris and Heather Silber Mohamed. Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2018.

This study looks at whether images accompanying news stories about immigrants or immigration policy disproportionately show immigrants working low-wage jobs or focus on their legal status. The two researchers analyzed a total of 338 images that appeared in three national news magazines — Newsweek, Time and U.S. News & World Report — between 2000 and 2010.

Among the main takeaways:

• More than 54% of the images studied that depicted immigrants portrayed them as unauthorized to be in the U.S. But less than 25% of the nation’s foreign-born population is unauthorized, note the researchers, Emily M. Farris, an assistant professor in political science at Texas Christian University, and Heather Silber Mohamed, an associate professor in the political science department at Clark University.
• About 40% of all images associated with coverage of immigrants or immigration policy show the U.S.-Mexico border or law enforcement officials, including border enforcement agents. News outlets included border walls and fencing in 19% of images.
• Of the 202 images depicting immigrants, about a quarter depict immigrants working. The researchers estimate that 73.1% of these images show immigrants engaged in low-skilled jobs such as day laborer and 26.9% show them in high-skilled jobs such as computer programmer.

The researchers write: “Both the text and the images of the media often frame immigrants in a negative light and one that is inconsistent with actual immigrant demographics. Given the power of framing in shaping attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy, these results are troubling in their inaccuracy.”

‘Bad Hombres’? An Examination of Identities in U.S. Media Coverage of Immigration
Heather Silber Mohamed and Emily M. Farris. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2020. 

Mohamed and Farris teamed up again, this time to look at how news images depict immigrants in terms of race, ethnicity and gender. They analyzed the same database of images used for the last study and discovered that immigrants who appear in the three news magazines between 2000 and 2010 are disproportionately Latino and male — a trend, they write, that arguably helped “pave the way for rhetoric about ‘bad hombres’ used by President Trump.”

Of the images studied, 75.9% depict Latino immigrants, who comprise 53.5% of immigrants nationally, according to the paper. In comparison, 13.3% of immigrants in the images are Asian, and Asians make up 26.7% of all U.S. immigrants. Europeans are the next largest group of immigrants in the U.S., comprising 13.6% of all immigrants nationwide. European immigrants appear in 3.7% of the images studied.

Overall, immigrant men greatly outnumber immigrant women in the images. The researchers point out that 76.5% of immigrants featured in the magazine images are men and 23.5% are women, even though the U.S. immigrant population is about evenly split between men and women.

“The gender bias in images of immigrants is prevalent across nearly all racial/ ethnic groups, and is particularly distorted among Latinos, for which Latinas comprised just 21.5 percent of the images of all Latinos, as well as immigrants from the Middle East, for which women constituted only 16.7 percent of all images from that group,” the researchers write. “In contrast, women represented nearly 30 percent of Asian immigrants, 33 percent of African immigrants, and 53 percent of European immigrants.”

Depictions of Latinos in print stories

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: A Corpus Linguistics Analysis of US Newspaper Coverage of Latinx, 1996–2016
Erik Bleich, et al. Journalism, 2018.

A team of researchers used computer-assisted coding to analyze a swath of print news articles to gauge how often negative themes about Latinos — criminality, unauthorized immigration and economic threat, for instance — appear in U.S. news coverage. The researchers found that “U.S. newspaper coverage of Latinx is not overwhelmingly negative on the whole. In fact, articles about Latinx are no more negative than a representative corpus of randomly selected articles.”

Another key finding: Negative coverage of Latinos during the 21-year study period ending in 2016 is counterbalanced by what the researchers categorize as positive coverage, which includes themes such as achievement, culture and growth.

“Positive coverage matters, and it is important to know that there has been a significant amount of positivity in coverage of Latinx in a broad cross-section of U.S. newspapers over the past two decades,” write the authors, led by Erik Bleich, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College.

The researchers analyzed 185,244 articles published in 17 newspapers between Jan. 1, 1996 and Dec. 31, 2016. The sample included national news outlets, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, and regional publications, such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Boston Globe are included.

To assess articles, Bleich and his colleagues searched for root words associated with certain themes. For example, an article containing the root words “unemployment,” “welfare,” “poverty,” “poor” or “homeless” was coded as reflecting the theme of economic threat.

The researchers write that “criminality is the most powerful theme within our corpus of newspapers, and that illegal immigration is another potent source of negativity. However, our analysis also suggests that immigration on its own as well as economic factors such as poverty, unemployment, and welfare use are not associated with as much negativity as is often assumed.”

Bleich and his colleagues identified achievement and culture as the two most influential positive themes in coverage of Latinos. They note that articles containing words associated with those two themes “constitute over 10 percent of all Latinx articles, and are, on average, more positive than over 80 percent of articles in our representative corpus.”

How Latinos respond to news coverage

Does Watching This Make Me Feel Ashamed or Angry? An Examination of Latino Americans’ Responses to Immigration Coverage
Andrea Figueroa-Caballero and Dana Mastro. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2019.

This study looks at how U.S. Latinos who aren’t immigrants process and interpret news stories about immigration, which tend to focus on immigration from Mexico. The Latinos surveyed for this study differ in their responses. Some felt shame while others felt anger. Mexican Americans were affected most strongly.

The authors explain that non-immigrant Latinos — especially Mexican Americans — who read and watch news coverage of immigration “might experience undue and damaging effects pertaining to their ethnic identity.”

“When reflecting on how immigration coverage typically portrays Latino immigrants, Mexican Americans evaluate such coverage as perpetuating negative preconceptions about their ethnic group whereas non-Mexican Latinos are less likely to do so,” write the authors, Andrea Figueroa-Caballero, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Missouri, and Dana Mastro, a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

To recruit people to complete the survey, conducted in February 2018, researchers used Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing marketplace many scholars use to find people for surveys and studies. A total of 139 non-immigrant Latinos participated.

The findings indicate that “Mexican Americans (vs. non-Mexican Latinos) not only experience greater desire to distance themselves from the messages about immigration in the news, but that experiencing this distancing motivation for Mexicans was largely influenced by the different emotional reactions elicited from viewing immigration news,” Figueroa-Caballero and Mastro explain. “Whereas shame can function to drive Mexican Americans further way from their shared ethnic identity with Latino immigrants depicted in the news, experiencing anger in response to negative group depictions has the potential to manifest in feelings of greater affiliation.”

When news is offered in English and Spanish

Seeing Spanish: The Effects of Language-Based Media Choices on Resentment and Belonging
Joshua P. Darr, Brittany N. Perry, Johanna L. Dunaway and Mingxiao Sui. Political Communication, 2020. 

When U.S. news outlets run stories in Spanish and in English, how do audience members who don’t speak Spanish feel about it? What about Spanish speakers? The authors of this study set out to answer those questions. Here’s what they learned: “Seeing online news articles about politics in Spanish — even those that do not mention immigration — significantly raises Hispanic racial resentment scores among Whites, while increasing feelings of inclusion and belonging among Spanish-speaking respondents.”

The researchers, led by Joshua P. Darr, an assistant professor in the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University, performed two experiments. They recruited 620 people to participate using Amazon Mechanical Turk.

For the first experiment, researchers recruited 620 people using Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing marketplace many scholars use to find people for surveys and studies. The 495 individuals who identified as non-Hispanic and white participated in the experiment, administered in April 2018.

Participants were shown headlines and short blurbs drawn from articles about politics, sports or entertainment news that appeared on popular news websites. For some people, the headlines and blurbs for stories about politics and entertainment were written in Spanish. After viewing the news items, participants answered a series of questions, including questions aimed at gauging their attitudes toward the perceived criminality of Latinos.

The second experiment, conducted in March 2018, mirrored the first but engaged a different group of people — 362 Spanish-speaking adults, recruited using the survey firm Qualtrics. Once these individuals viewed the news blurbs and headlines, they responded to questions designed to measure their sense of belonging in the U.S. 

The researchers discovered that white, non-Hispanic participants who saw a politics article blurb in Spanish scored 5.3% higher on an index measuring Hispanic racial resentment than those who viewed the same blurb in English. Meanwhile, Spanish speakers who saw the politics article blurb in Spanish had stronger feelings of belonging in the U.S. — their sense of belonging rated 9.6% higher than Spanish speakers who viewed the English blurb.

Looking for more research on Latinos and immigrants? Check out our write-up on how printing election materials in Spanish affects Latinos’ chances of being elected. We’ve also highlighted research on the effectiveness of border walls, mental health among immigrants and how the DACA program has impacted unauthorized immigrants’ health, high school graduation rates and labor market outcomes.      

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On Aug. 14, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a rule to restrict immigrants’ ability to obtain legal permanent residency, based on whether they have received government benefits. The rule is due to go into effect Oct. 15.

The rule considers immigrants who receive benefits such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid likely to become “public charges.” (Also known as food stamps, SNAP is a program that offers low-income adults a form of debit payment to purchase groceries at authorized retailers.) Per a definition from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the term “public charges” refers to individuals who are “likely to become primarily dependent on the government for subsistence, as demonstrated by either the receipt of public cash assistance for income maintenance, or institutionalization for long-term care at government expense.” These individuals would be denied green cards, which provide a legal means for immigrants to remain in the country permanently.

This new rule is an expansion of a policy that has existed since 1882. Currently, immigrants can be considered public charges if they are in long-term institutional care or if they rely on Supplementary Security Income, which supports people who are disabled, blind, or aged.

“The public charge rule is affecting people who have been admitted legally to the U.S., but they have not yet become citizens,” says health policy researcher Leighton Ku, a professor and director of the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University. “The public charge rule is basically saying that people who are participating in Medicaid, SNAP or public housing may find that they cannot become lawful permanent residents — that is, they can’t get a green card.”

This roundup of research looks at the public charge rule from a variety of angles. First, we summarize research that examines the economic mobility of immigrants as well as their health care expenditures compared with the rest of the U.S. population. Overall, the research finds that immigrants account for a disproportionately smaller share of health care expenditures than the U.S.-born population.

Next, we summarize research predicting health care-related effects of the new rule — repercussions that might affect both immigrants and U.S.-born individuals who seek medical care at community health centers, children with special medical needs born to immigrant parents and people who rely on home health care provided disproportionately by immigrants.

Ku says that some of the research is preliminary, because of the recency of the rule. It’s worth noting that some of the work has not yet been published in peer-reviewed journals. “If you have a cutting edge issue, you don’t want to wait for six months to a year to two years for something to get out,” Ku explains. Two pieces of scholarship included in this roundup — a working paper and an academic policy brief — haven’t been peer reviewed. (To learn more about the differences between peer-reviewed research, working papers and white papers, consult our tip sheet).

As journalists work to communicate the potential impacts of the public charge rule, Leah Zallman, who is director of research at the Institute for Community Health, a primary care physician at Cambridge Health Alliance and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, offers the following advice:

“I think the biggest thing that journalists can do is be really clear and concise about who the rule applies to and who it does not,” she says. “This does not apply to people who have their green card. It does not apply to citizens. And even among the people for whom it does [apply], there are a lot of exclusions.”

For example, she notes, the rule does not count Medicaid received by pregnant women or individuals under age 21 as a benefit that would render these groups ineligible for permanent residency.

Zallman adds that it is also important to clarify misperceptions about which benefits are included in the new public charge rule.

The Department of Homeland Security lists the following as benefits that would render recipients ineligible for permanent residency under the new public charge rule:

• Any federal, state, local, or tribal cash assistance for income maintenance
• Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
• Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)
• Federal, state or local cash benefit programs for income maintenance (often called “General Assistance” in the state context, but which may exist under other names)
• Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or formerly called “Food Stamps”)
• Section 8 Housing Assistance under the Housing Choice Voucher Program
• Section 8 Project-Based Rental Assistance (including Moderate Rehabilitation)
• Public Housing under section 9 the Housing Act of 1937, 42 U.S.C. 1437 et seq.
• Federally funded Medicaid (with certain exclusions)

She also suggests journalists stress that the rule hasn’t yet gone into effect and that it might be delayed due to ongoing litigation. Additionally, the rule stipulates that benefits that individuals have received in the past will not be held against them – only when the public charge rule goes into effect does receipt of benefits become a potential issue.

The Economic Mobility of Immigrants: Public Charge Rules Could Foreclose Future Opportunities
Ku, Leighton; Pillai, Drishti. Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health working paper, November 2018.

This paper challenges an assumption underlying the new public charge rule. “At its heart, the policy is based on the belief that the United States should screen out and exclude low-income immigrants, especially those who use public benefits, because they may remain poor in the future and fail to contribute to the nation’s economy,” the authors write.

To test this assumption, the authors analyze data from the 2016 American Community Survey (ACS), a large, nationally representative survey conducted by the Census Bureau. They model how immigrants’ income changes over time as compared with non-immigrants. They find that while immigrants start out with lower incomes than U.S.-born individuals of the same age, they eventually catch up. “With time and experience, immigrants’ job skills, language proficiency and social capital accumulate and the gap between the U.S born and immigrants gradually converges, on average within about twenty years,” the authors write.

Further, when comparing immigrants and non-immigrants with less than a high school education, immigrants — who start off with relatively lower incomes — are able to close the income gap faster than their peers with more education. These less educated immigrants are able to close the gap separating them from similarly situated U.S. citizens within six or seven years, on average. “The economic mobility of less educated (and low income) immigrants is especially strong,” the authors write.

“Policies that make it harder for recent low-income immigrants to remain in the U.S. ignore the upward progress that immigrants have as they assimilate into the mainstream, which has been part of the immigrant experience for generations,” they conclude.

Medical Expenditures on and by Immigrant Populations in the United States: A Systematic Review
Flavin, Lila; Zallman, Leah; McCormick, Danny; Boyd, J. Wesley. International Journal of Health Services, August 2018.

This review looks at the state of the research on health care expenditures of U.S. immigrants and U.S.-born individuals. “A common misperception among U.S. policymakers and the general public is that immigrants use more health care assets than those born in the United States, thereby draining our country’s medical resources,” the authors write. This paper addresses that misperception through a systematic review of the literature. After evaluating the relevancy of 188 papers related to the topic, the researchers ultimately decided to summarize 16 studies published between 2000 and 2017.

Key findings:

• Immigrants’ overall health care expenditures were between one-half to two-thirds that of U.S.-born individuals.
• Per capita public health care expenditures (e.g., Medicaid and Medicare) were lower for immigrants than for U.S.-born citizens.
• Further, immigrants, including those without documentation, contributed $14 billion more to Medicare’s Trust Fund than they withdrew.
• In 2003, immigrants who had lived in the U.S. for less than 10 years had annual health care expenditures of $1,380, on average. U.S.-born individuals had expenditures of $3,156.
• Immigrants account for a disproportionately small percentage of health care expenditures relative to the U.S.-born population. While they account for 12% of the population, they account for 8.6% of total U.S. health care expenditures, per an analysis of data collected between 1999 and 2006. Undocumented immigrants account for 5% of the population and 1.4% of total medical expenditures, according to analysis of data from 2000 to 2009.
• The majority of emergency Medicaid users were immigrants without documentation. Their expenditures accounted for less than 1% of Medicaid’s total budget.
• “While annual U.S. medical spending in 2016 was a staggering $3.3 trillion, immigrants accounted for less than 10% of the overall spending — and recent immigrants were responsible for only 1% of total spending,” the authors conclude. “Given these figures, it is unlikely that restrictions on immigration into the United States would result in a meaningful decrease in health care spending.” Further, the study authors add that restricting immigration would “financially destabilize” aspects of the health care economy, such as Medicare, to which immigrants contribute more than they withdraw.
• “Latino immigrants were 20% less likely to have health insurance than their non-Latino white U.S.-born counterparts,” the authors write. “Even when immigrants were insured, they had lower health care expenditures.” They suggest that immigrants “may constitute a low-risk pool that subsidizes the insurance market for U.S.-born individuals.”

How Could the Public Charge Proposed Rule Affect Community Health Centers?
Ku, Leighton; et al. Geiger Gibson / RCHN Community Health Foundation Research Collaborative Policy Issue Brief, November 2018.

This study comes from scholars at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University who have received support from the RCHN Community Health Foundation, a non-profit devoted to supporting community health centers through investment, outreach, education and research.

Federally-funded community health centers are legally required to serve all community residents, regardless of insurance status. Reimbursements from Medicaid — a health insurance program for people who don’t have sufficient income or resources to otherwise attain health insurance — are the single largest source of revenue for these centers. Accordingly, as Medicaid enrollment rises, community health centers are likely to see increased Medicaid revenue. Recent policy reforms provide evidence to this effect: Community health centers in states that did not expand Medicaid eligibility following policy changes that took effect in 2014 tend to be smaller and serve fewer patients than those in expansion states.

Because the new “public charge” rule would consider Medicaid enrollment a factor in denying green card applicants permanent residency, the authors of this study predict that many people – including U.S. citizens — will disenroll from the program. The authors go on to estimate potential effects on community health centers.

The researchers estimate that about 5.3% of the 13.3 million Medicaid beneficiaries who received care at community health centers in 2017 — that’s 709,000 individuals — were immigrants who entered the country legally but were not yet citizens. The researchers suggest that members of this group might disenroll from Medicaid due to the public charge rule. They add that citizen family members and family members who entered the country legally but are not yet citizens might also disenroll, bringing the estimate of people who might disenroll up to 2.6 million people.

The researchers estimate community health centers could lose between $346 million and $624 million in Medicaid revenue in a year as a result of the new “public charge” rule.

They indicate that if half of the immigrants who entered the country legally and used community health centers in 2017 disenrolled from Medicaid, community health centers would lose $346 million in a year. The centers, however, will continue to serve all, and so the researchers expect demand to stay the same while reimbursement revenue decreases (self-pay for services received at community health centers depends on income). In turn, health centers might reduce staff and hours, scale back services or close entirely. The researchers estimate that 295,000 fewer patients will receive care in a year due to potential cutbacks related to decreased revenue.

Higher estimates, which take family members into account, predict a $624 million yearly revenue loss as well as reductions in patient capacity. Centers would be able to provide care to over half a million fewer patients over one year. These estimates affect the entire community, regardless of immigration status. “Health centers care for everyone in the community without regard to citizenship status or other personal characteristics not related to health care need,” the authors write. “Because the communities in which health centers operate also tend to have sizable immigrant populations, policies that either directly or indirectly implicate their Medicaid enrollment are likely to produce significant spillover effects.”

Trends in Food Insecurity and SNAP Participation Among Immigrant Families of U.S.-Born Young Children
Bovell-Ammon, Allison; et al. Children, 2019.

This research finds that despite their eligibility, many immigrant parents whose children are U.S. citizens do not participate in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps. The study involved 37,570 caregivers of young children who were interviewed in emergency rooms and primary care clinics in cities across the U.S. to determine their food security status and participation in SNAP. Of the caregivers in the sample, 21.4% were immigrants.

The findings indicate a sharp decline in participation among immigrant families in the first six months of 2018. Lead researcher Allison Bovell-Ammon spoke with Journalist’s Resource in November 2018, after she presented her findings at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting. She said her findings document a “chilling effect” in immigrant communities in which fear prevents immigrants from accessing social programs despite their continuing eligibility. This matches anecdotal reports from frontline providers, she added.

Bovell-Ammon’s research finds that among foreign-born mothers in the study who had been in the United States for less than five years, SNAP participation stood at 43% in 2017. It then dropped to 34.8% in the first half of 2018. For families in the study that had been in the U.S. for more than five years, SNAP participation grew to 44.7% in 2017 and then dropped to 42.7% in 2018. Throughout the period studied, SNAP participation was higher among families with U.S.-born mothers than with immigrant mothers.

Meanwhile, food insecurity rates grew among all groups from 2007 to 2018.

“Food insecurity is associated with poor health outcomes from the prenatal period all the way through old age,” Bovell-Ammon told Journalist’s Resource. “SNAP is effective at reducing food insecurity, which improves health,” she added.

Forgoing Food Assistance out of Fear: Simulating the Child Poverty Impact of Making SNAP a Legal Liability for Immigrants
Laird, Jennifer; Santelli, Isaac; Waldfogel, Jane; Wimer, Christopher. Socius, 2019.

This study estimates the effects of the public charge proposal on SNAP enrollment. The authors look at data came from the 2017 Current Population Survey, conducted by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They estimate the effects on children if between 2% and 35% of adult noncitizens seeking green cards cancel their SNAP benefits for the entire household.

At the lower end of the range, the authors estimate that about 300,00 people will disenroll in SNAP in response to changes to the public charge rule. Over one-third of this group consists of U.S. citizen children, the authors specify. At the high end of the range, they estimate that up to 7.9 million people — including almost 2 million children, most of whom are U.S. citizens — will lose access to SNAP.

“The typical SNAP household with noncitizens would have to increase their income by more than 10 percent to make up for their lost SNAP benefit,” the authors calculate. If this is not possible, the authors predict an increase in the country’s child poverty rate.

Implications of Changing Public Charge Immigration Rules for Children Who Need Medical Care
Zallman, Leah; et al. JAMA Pediatrics, July 2019.

This study estimates how many children might lose benefits through programs such as Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program due to changes to the public charge rule. The authors looked at nationally representative survey data on 4,007 children under age 18. Included were children who were insured by Medicaid and CHIP or resided in a household where at least one household member reported receiving SNAP. Kids who lived with at least one non-citizen adult were considered by the researchers to be at risk of losing benefits. The researchers made their estimates by drawing on a similar, past scenario: In 1996, the federal government made changes to Medicaid eligibility requirements; subsequently, immigrant parents – and their children — dropped out of the program.

The researchers estimate that 8.3 million children currently enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP or receiving SNAP benefits are at risk of disenrollment. About 5.5 million of these kids have specific medical needs, which the authors define as a medical diagnosis or disability or need for a specific treatment.

Zallman and her colleagues emphasize that because the public charge rule does not apply to individuals under age 21, children will be needlessly deprived of health care because of fear and confusion.

The authors add that their analysis might underestimate the number of children at risk of losing benefits. “Because of widespread fear and confusion, some immigrant families in which all members are citizens might also disenroll from benefits,” they write. “Similarly, our estimates of the number who may disenroll are based on scenarios from welfare reform that denied federal benefits to some immigrants but did not impose specific sanctions; because the proposed public charge rule explicitly threatens families’ immigration status, disenrollment rates might be higher than we estimate.”

Care for America’s Elderly and Disabled People Relies on Immigrant Labor
Zallman, Leah; et al. Health Affairs, June 2019.

This study analyzes nationally representative survey data collected on 180,084 adults in 2017 to understand the composition of the “direct care” workforce. The data came from the 2018 Current Population Survey, conducted by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The researchers define direct care occupations as those in the personal and home care field, including home health aides and nursing and psychiatric aides. For the purposes of their analysis, respondents who were born outside the U.S. were considered immigrants. The survey did not collect information about documentation status, so the researchers used a method that has been applied previously to this dataset in labor economics and health care research to estimate proportions of unauthorized immigrants.

Key findings:

• In 2017, 27.5% of direct care workers were immigrants.
• Immigrants with legal, noncitizen status accounted for 9% of direct care workers. Naturalized citizens made up 13.9% and unauthorized immigrants totaled 4.3% of direct care workers. For reference, the paper cites the following statistics: immigrants with legal noncitizen status comprise 5.2% of the U.S. population, naturalized citizens make up 6.8% and unauthorized immigrants account for 3.6%.
• Immigrant health care workers were more likely than U.S.-born workers to be employed by home health agencies (13.1% vs. 7.9%) and in settings such as private households and residential facilities that do not have nursing services.
• The authors write that these findings emphasize immigrants’ disproportionate role in providing health care support for people in the U.S. “In light of current shortages, high turnover rates, low retention rates, growing demand for direct care workers, and immigrants’ already disproportionate role in filling such jobs, policies that curtail immigration are likely to compromise the availability of care,” the authors write. “Moreover, the anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies that restrict immigration threaten the health and well-being of immigrants who are entrusted with the care of the nation’s elderly and disabled people.”

Looking for more research? We’ve written about a study that finds enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Affordable Care Act declined among Hispanic citizens of the United States after a new immigration enforcement program took effect.

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Between October 2018 and June 2019, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 234,443 adults; 390,308 family units (which includes all individuals apprehended with another family member); and 63,624 unaccompanied children at the country’s southwestern border, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

After apprehension, migrants are either repatriated or detained by Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Detention by CBP is intended for the short-term only, according to a July 2, 2019 memo from Jennifer L. Costello, deputy inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security. She writes, “CBP is responsible solely for providing short-term detention for aliens arriving in the United States without valid travel documents.”

After an initial processing, these individuals should then be transferred to other government agencies, such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). “Currently, because both ICE and HHS are operating at or above capacity, CBP has experienced increasing instances of prolonged detention in its facilities,” Costello writes. Additionally, CBP facilities are experiencing overcrowding.

On July 18, 2019, Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan reported that on any given day, there are between 10,000 and 12,000 migrants held in custody by CBP.

McAleenan described the overcrowding at CBP facilities in his tweet: “We generally consider 4,000 detainees to be a high number of migrants in custody, and we consider 6,000 detainees to be a crisis level.”

(4/5) We generally consider 4,000 detainees to be a high number of migrants in custody, and we consider 6,000 detainees to be a crisis level. Currently, on any given day, @CBP has between 10,000 and 12,000 detainees in custody.

— Acting Sec. Kevin McAleenan (@DHSMcAleenan) July 18, 2019

Many of those in custody are children. On June 7, 2019, according to Costello’s memo, there were nearly 2,800 unaccompanied children in CBP custody. By June 25, 2019, the number decreased to fewer than 1,000.

News reports have chronicled the objectionable conditions at detention facilities. At a facility near El Paso, Texas, for example, lawyers say there has been an outbreak of the flu and kids have inadequate food, water and sanitation, the Associated Press has reported. Older children are taking care of younger ones.

Lawyers documented these conditions while observing and interviewing 60 children at a facility in Clint, Texas. These attorneys were tasked with inspecting detention facilities to ensure they comply with the Flores settlement, a 1997 agreement that sets minimal standards to protect the quality of life for detained minors and requires the federal government to return them to their families or licensed programs without excessive delay.

This year, five children have died while in CBP custody.

A policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics provides an overview of the practice of detaining immigrant children in the U.S. The statement summarizes research findings on the negative physical and emotional impacts of detention on children, even among those detained only briefly. “There is no evidence indicating that any time in detention is safe for children,” the authors write. “It is the position of the AAP that children in the custody of their parents should never be detained, nor should they be separated from a parent, unless a competent family court makes that determination.”

The statement, published in the journal Pediatrics, recommends “limited exposure” to Department of Homeland Security facilities for children, as well as long-term evaluation of the health impacts for children who have experienced detention. “From the moment children are in the custody of the United States, they deserve health care that meets guideline-based standards, treatment that mitigates harm or traumatization, and services that support their health and well-being,” the authors write. These include education, child care, interpretation and legal services. The authors conclude: “Children deserve protection from additional traumatization in the United States and the identification and treatment of trauma that may have occurred in children’s country of origin, during migration, or during immigration processing or detention in the United States.”

Researchers have documented and quantified the physical and mental health toll that immigrant children experience during and after detention. Post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, weight loss and sleep problems are widespread. The following studies describe the prevalence and severity of these conditions and which groups of children are most affected.

Mental Health of Children Held at a United States Immigration Detention Center
MacLean, Sarah A.; et al. Social Science & Medicine, June 2019.

This study uses interviews and survey data to assess the mental health of 425 children between the ages of 4 and 17 held in a U.S. immigration detention center in mid-2018. While in detention, mothers were interviewed in either English or Spanish to assess their children’s behavior. Behavioral scores were assigned to designate whether children were in the “normal,” “borderline” or “abnormal” range. Some children — a subset of 150 who fell between the ages of 9 and 17 years old — completed a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) screening assessment.

The authors found that, based on the mothers’ reports, 32% of children in the study had “abnormal” emotional problems and 14% had “abnormal” peer problems such as preferring to play alone. One in 10 children scored in the abnormal range for every factor measured. Children who had been separated from their mothers were more likely to have abnormal emotional problems than children who had never been separated (49% versus 29%). Children between the ages of 4 and 8 tended to have higher rates of abnormal conduct problems, hyperactivity and total difficulties (including emotional problems, conduct problems and hyperactivity) compared with older children. The authors highlight this as especially concerning given that “Young children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of their environment, and trauma experienced early in life has a significant effect on emotional and behavioral development.”

The PTSD screening results indicate that 17% had a probable diagnosis of PTSD (all four screening criteria were met). Additionally, 19% of the sample met two of the criteria for PTSD, and another 18% met three.

Compared with children in the general U.S. population, detained children had higher rates of emotional and behavioral difficulties and PTSD.

The Impact of Immigration Detention on Mental Health: A Systematic Review
von Werthern, Martha; et al. BMC Psychiatry, December 2018.

This review presents the findings of 26 studies relating to immigrant detention and mental health. To be included in the review, studies had to be published in peer-reviewed journals, include people detained for immigration purposes in various countries, report on mental health problems and measure these outcomes quantitatively. In all, the 26 studies encompassed a sample of 2,099 participants of various ages.

“Overall,” the authors write, “these studies indicated that adults, adolescents and children experienced high levels of mental health problems. Anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder were most commonly reported both during and following detention.” Mental health symptoms were elevated in immigrants who were detained as compared with immigrants who were not detained. Symptoms were also more severe for immigrants detained for longer durations, and among those with greater exposure to trauma prior to detention.

The Mental Health of Children and Parents Detained on Christmas Island: Secondary Analysis of an Australian Human Rights Commission Data Set
Mares, Sarah. Health and Human Rights, December 2016.

Non-citizens arriving in Australia by boat without valid documentation are subject to mandatory, indefinite detention until immigration authorities make a decision regarding whether to grant a visa. From July 2013 through December 2014, some of these immigrants were detained on Christmas Island, located in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. Of the 1,717 total detainees on Christmas Island, 356 were aged 17 and younger.

This study looks at data collected through a 2014 Australian Human Rights Commission inquiry into the detention of children on Christmas Island. The data analyzed includes surveys completed by children and responses solicited from parents. The sample comprises 129 children ages 17 and younger. Children in the sample had been detained for an average of seven months.

Of the 35 children between the ages of 12 and 17 for whom a psychiatric distress assessment was completed, 85.7% scored as likely to have a severe mental disorder. Only one child scored as likely to be well. The rest of the children scored as likely to have either a mild or moderate mental disorder. Most children experienced at least some symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Parents, and possibly some adolescents, completed a strengths-and-difficulties questionnaire for 70 children between the ages of 3 and 17. Half of the children had abnormal total difficulty scores; another quarter had borderline scores. Abnormal emotional symptoms were present in 71.5% of the children.

Parents of children aged 4 and younger reported concerns about their children’s mental and emotional health – two-thirds believed detention had an effect. Specific concerns included sleep problems, anxiety, incontinence, self-harming and poor eating.

Stories from Unaccompanied Children in Immigration Detention: A Composite Account
Zwi, Karen; Mares, Sarah. Journal of Pediatrics and Child Health, July 2015.

This study is also a product of the 2014 Australian Human Rights Commission inquiry into the detention of children on Christmas Island. The authors spoke to over 40 unaccompanied children between the ages of 14 and 17, the majority of whom had been in detention for six to eight months.

Issues that surfaced during the interviews included the mental distress the children experienced in detention, lack of education and activities, and concerns about being transferred to adult detention facilities.

A sampling of their comments:

“Detention isn’t good for all children and adult (sic) – especially unaccompanied minors like me with no parents. I feel so sad without them. I leave them in horrible country and every time I’m so worried about them. Though I’m safe – I’m more stress than before because my family are in danger. And I don’t have even a little hope … and I don’t know where is my future?” said an unaccompanied 17-year-old who had been detained for 8 months.

“I cry all the time. I can’t sleep. I cry all the time in my room. I’m afraid of what’s going to happen next.”

“Of all the bad things that have already happened now, I feel I wish I died at sea instead of then dying slowly here.”

Asylum-Seeking Children’s Experiences of Detention in Canada: A Qualitative Study
Kronick, Rachel; Rousseau, Cécile; Cleveland, Janet. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 2015.

This study analyzes responses from in-depth interviews of 20 immigrant families — including parents and children — while they were detained in Canada between March 2011 and June 2012. The families were asylum seekers and failed refugee claimants — people who sought, but were denied, refugee status. At the time of their interviews, families had been detained for 56.4 days, on average.

Researchers also observed participants in immigration holding centers for one day a week for six months.

Common behavioral and emotional responses in children included anxiety, mood changes, sleep difficulties and decreased appetite. “I was traumatized,” said one 13-year-old girl who had been detained for 48 hours.

“In summary, children’s reactions, including those of infants and older teenagers, suggest that the constraining and frightening environment of detention constitutes an acute stress,” the authors write. “Even very brief detention appears to be acutely distressing for children.”

After detention, most families reported that their children experienced ongoing emotional and behavioral issues, including separation anxiety, fear of people in uniforms, sleep problems, PTSD symptoms, selective mutism and regression of developmental milestones.

The Mental and Physical Health Difficulties of Children Held Within a British Immigration Detention Center: A Pilot Study
Lorek, Ann; et al. Child Abuse & Neglect, September 2009.

This study looks at the experiences of 24 children between the ages of 3 months and 17 years held in a British immigration detention center in 2006 for between 11 and 155 days. The researchers analyzed assessments of the children and their parents or guardians that had been conducted by either a pediatrician or psychologist or both.

Of the 11 children assessed by a psychologist, all reported symptoms of depression and anxiety. These children all reported problems with eating (e.g., poor appetite) and confusion, disorientation or fright at being in a detention facility. Other common problems included behavioral difficulties, trouble sleeping, headaches and abdominal pains.

Of the 20 children assessed by a pediatrician, eight lost weight while detained. Two children had to go to the hospital – one for pneumonia, and one for vomiting, loose stool and irritability. Six children had missed medical appointments while detained, such as appointments for dental care or follow-up care for spina bifida. For the eight children between the ages of 1 and 4, all mothers raised developmental or behavioral concerns, including frequent crying, food refusal and regression to bedwetting, with the clinician.

The authors conclude: “This study’s findings indicate that the experience of detention, even for a relatively brief period of time, has a detrimental effect on the mental and physical health of children.”

Looking for more? Journalist’s Resource has a related research roundup on how family separation affects children, as well as tips on covering immigration and summaries of studies about immigrants’ mental health. 

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Dozens of studies over the years have found that immigration has little or no effect on crime in the U.S., on average. But research forthcoming in Criminology shows those studies offer an incomplete picture.

What we know about the relationship between crime and immigration is based largely on crimes that have been reported to police. But victims are much less likely to report a violent crime in areas that have drawn large numbers of immigrants in recent decades, a new study finds.

In fact, as the proportion of immigrants rises in these “new destination” areas, odds plummet that a victim will go to police to report crimes such as aggravated assault, robbery and rape.

In neighborhoods where 10% of residents were born outside the U.S., the probability of reporting is 48%, researchers estimate. In neighborhoods where 65% of residents are immigrants, there is a 5% chance that a victim will report.

The study’s authors looked at crime reporting in counties with long-established immigrant communities — New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago, for example — and compared it to crime reporting in counties that began attracting immigrant residents after 1990.

They find that crime reporting in counties with long-established immigrant neighborhoods is at about the same level as crime reporting in neighborhoods without large numbers of immigrants. But crime reporting is lower in immigrant neighborhoods located in counties the researchers call “new destinations,” which have “shorter histories of concentrated immigrant settlement.”

The study’s lead author, Min Xie, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland, told Journalist’s Resource that the findings apply to all victims who live in these neighborhoods and are Latino, white or black. She and co-author Eric Baumer, a professor of sociology and criminology at The Pennsylvania State University, did not have information about victims’ immigration status at the time of the study.

Looking for ‘alternative data sources’

To generate these estimates, Xie and Baumer analyzed federal survey data collected between 1996 and 2014 from individuals aged 12 and older who were asked about crimes committed against them. The researchers focused on the 19,225 cases of violent crime that were recorded by the survey, including whether those crimes were reported to police.

Xie says pairing the survey data with census tract data allowed her and Baumer to assess how much crime isn’t reported to police and who’s not coming forward.

“Even though we understand crime statistics from police departments are important data sources, they are limited,” Xie says.

She says that the study’s findings do not contradict prior research, but rather offer additional context to help explain the relationship between immigration and crime.

“It’s important to use alternative data sources so we can understand the relationship better,” she says.

Prior research and its limitations

Last year, the Annual Review of Criminology published a review of 51 studies on crime and immigration dated between 1994 and 2014. Overall, according to the review, the most common outcome reported in these studies “is a null or nonsignificant association between immigration and crime.”

When the authors of the review analyzed data from the 51 studies, they found a slightly negative relationship between crime and immigration, but that the magnitude of the relationship “is so weak it is practically zero.”

The review’s authors also note that official crime data are not sufficient to answer a lot of questions about crime and immigration. For example, the data does not distinguish between documented and undocumented immigrants. Also, crimes such as sexual assault, gang violence and domestic violence are underreported among immigrants for various reasons, including language barriers and a fear of authorities, the authors explain.

“To truly advance research on the immigration-crime nexus, critical data limitations must be overcome, including incorporating information about nationality in official data collection efforts, further distinguishing between documented and undocumented status in the data, and addressing the problem of underreporting, especially with respect to immigrant victims,” write the authors, Graham Ousey of the College of William and Mary and Charis Kubrin of the University of California, Irvine.

Xie says research that relies on self-reported data about immigrants, some of whom do not want to draw attention from authorities, may not be as accurate as researchers would like. She says she’s investigating whether unauthorized immigration affects crime reporting levels.

“We are actually right now trying to do research to incorporate information about the estimated number of unauthorized immigrants — we are hoping to incorporate that data to see whether or not that would affect our findings,” she says.

Xie says she also plans to look at how reporting levels may differ among neighborhoods when it comes to property crimes such as burglary and motor vehicle theft.

Story ideas for journalists

• Research studies of crime often try to present a picture of the nation as a whole, Xie explains. She suggests journalists remind their audiences that researchers generally report their findings as averages. She also urges journalists to look at how local communities differ from national averages in terms of how immigration affects neighborhoods as well as how crime is reported and how police respond to immigrants. “There could be some local variations that are important,” she says.
• Research conducted in other countries offers important insights that could affect how Americans think about immigration and immigration policy, Xie says. “Don’t forget the U.S. is not the only place dealing with immigration,” she says. It’s a good idea for journalists to examine those studies and put them into context.

Writing about immigration? Read our tip sheet on covering immigration from Angilee Shah, a former senior editor at Public Radio International, and our tip sheet on covering Latino immigrant communities specifically from Maria Hinojosa, the anchor and executive producer of the NPR show “Latino USA.”

Looking for immigration-related research? We’ve gathered research on family separation, immigrant mental health and how the DACA program impacts local communities.

The post Victims less likely to report violent crime in newer immigrant communities appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Editor’s note: On March 12, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy will award the 2019 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting to a stellar investigative report that has had a direct impact on government, politics and policy at the national, state or local levels. Seven reporting teams have been chosen as finalists for the 2019 prize, which carries a $10,000 award for finalists and $25,000 for the winner. This year, for the first time, Journalist’s Resource is publishing a series of interviews with the finalists, in the interest of giving a behind-the-scenes explanation of the process, tools, and legwork it takes to create an important piece of investigative journalism. Journalist’s Resource is a project of the Shorenstein Center, but had no involvement with or influence on the judging process for the Goldsmith Prize finalists or winner.

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You’ve probably heard the tape — the cries of children in an immigrant detention center, separated from their parents by United States immigration authorities.

ProPublica posted the audio recording to its website on June 18, 2018, just minutes before a press briefing at the White House on the administration’s family separation policy. A massive public and political outcry followed.

Less than two days after the tape was posted, President Donald Trump signed an executive order ending the policy. Family reunification efforts ensued.

“I’ve been doing this a long time, and I haven’t ever been part of a story that has had such powerful impact so swiftly,” Ginger Thompson, senior reporter at ProPublica, said.

ProPublica continued its investigation into the conditions at the detention centers, resulting in the ongoing story series “Zero Tolerance: Trump’s Immigration Policy at the Border.” The series examines reports of sexual assault against immigrant children in multiple shelters; the story of a 4-year-old boy who was separated from his father after the family separation policy ended; and an interactive map of 100 facilities holding immigrant children across the U.S.  This is the story of how the series was reported.

THE TAPE

“I got a call on a Friday after work, I believe it was Friday, about a tape,” Thompson said. “I wasn’t really sure what the tape was going to sound like. I didn’t get it until the next day, Saturday, and I was driving back to New York from Maryland.”

Thompson said Jennifer Harbury, a lawyer and human rights activist, helped her get the tape.

“I put the tape on my car stereo and heard it for the first time and was shocked by it,” Thompson continued. “There were so many questions about the tape at the time. It sounded horrific, but I needed to then spend some time figuring out whether the tape really was what I was told that it was.”

Thompson spoke with her editors and began the process of authenticating and securing permission to share the tape with the public. It was a two-day effort.

“I’ve known Jennifer for a long time and I think she trusted that I would have as much concern about protecting the source of the tape as she did,” Thompson said. “So building on that trust that I think she had in me, I was able to talk her through why I needed the source of the tape. I needed to know who that was, I needed to speak to that source, and I needed the source to let me run the whole thing.”

“It was one gentle conversation forward after another,” Thompson said. After Harbury agreed to connect her with the person who recorded the audio, Thompson persuaded the source to let ProPublica put it online. “I think the source was finally convinced by the idea that this tape could potentially be a game changer,” Thompson said. “This person recorded this tape because they were worried about the impact that this policy was having on children. The person wanted some change to the policy. The person wanted the policy ended. And I was able to convince that person that unless we ran the tape in its entirety it wouldn’t have any impact at all. No one would believe it.”

To authenticate the tape, Thompson verified details of the source’s identity, and the specifics of when, where and how the audio was recorded. She also used the content of the audio itself to authenticate it.

“There’s a little girl on that tape who made it really easy at some point, because she asked authorities on the tape to let her make a phone call to her aunt, and then she rattled off the aunt’s phone number,” Thompson explained. “The tape was so hard to understand, I wasn’t sure until I listened to it about 15 times what the number was.” Thompson tried several combinations – including a wrong-number dial to a professor in Brooklyn, before reaching the right contact. “My significant other knows area codes really well, and he said, ‘It’s probably a six, because that’s a Houston area code and that’s a large Central American community. Try the six,’” Thompson recalled. “We called [with] the six and that’s when we got the aunt.”

The child’s aunt shared details about the 6-year-old Salvadoran girl’s separation from her mother, which ran along with the audio on ProPublica. “I know she’s not an American citizen,” she is quoted as saying in an interview with ProPublica. “But she’s a human being. She’s a child. How can they treat her this way?

THE MAP

After Thompson secured the tape, the newsroom held a meeting to determine next steps to take in their coverage of the “zero tolerance” immigration policy.

Michael Grabell, who covers immigration at ProPublica, explained that the outlet sees itself as reporting stories that traditional newsrooms aren’t doing or aren’t able to do. All the big national newsrooms were working on the same story, trying to learn about the conditions children experienced in these facilities. ProPublica wanted to look beyond federal government records, Grabell said.

“I suggested, what about police reports?” Grabell said. “People kind of forget about police reports, how many details they give you, even more so than regulatory records,” Grabell said.

For example, ProPublica found that over five years, police responded to at least 125 calls reporting sex offenses that occurred at children’s shelters that mainly serve immigrants.

Securing police records can be a large undertaking because “it’s a hundred jurisdictions that might have records,” Grabell said. But they’re generally easier to come by since their release is governed by state or local public records regulations rather than the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

His advice to journalists: “Don’t forget what you learned when you were a cub reporter: police reports are incredible tools no matter what beat it is that you’re covering, and will often reveal things that you couldn’t get otherwise,” Grabell said.

And if any given jurisdiction refuses to release records? “Read the law yourself,” he said. In some instances, Grabell was able to find exemptions that allowed him access to records after his requests had been denied.

Grabell and fellow reporter Topher Sanders’ persistence yielded shocking stories.

In one case, the reporting team was following up on an inspection report’s brief mention of child molestation at a particular center in Arizona. “We had no police reports of this coming out of the area,” he said.

So Sanders spent all night searching the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system for a case that fit the specifics they were looking for. Sanders discovered that a worker at a shelter for immigrant children in Arizona had been accused of molesting eight teenage boys over nearly one year.

Subsequently the governor of Arizona ordered inspections of all the state’s shelters, during which it was discovered that employees at two centers had not completed background checks. Those shelters were shut down. Elsewhere, in Miami, a sexual assault case was reopened after ProPublica revealed lapses in how the investigation was handled.

As Grabell and his colleagues pieced together details about the location and management of these shelters across the country, staff on the research and news apps teams at ProPublica worked to make an interactive map of this information. No such map existed at the time. The team homed in on locations through federal government grant reports, state inspection records and business records in addition to police reports.

The map, which is publicly accessible online, features the location of 100 immigrant children’s shelters across the country. The map conveys specifics about the country’s far-reaching network of facilities and the organizations that run them. The reporting tool was made public with hopes that people with knowledge of the specific shelters in the system might come forward with additional information.

COLLABORATION

ProPublica’s broader investigation relied on collaboration with other newsrooms and with the public, both domestically and internationally.

Its media partners were: Animal Político (Mexico), BuzzFeed News, El Faro (El Salvador), Frontline, The Intercept, Plaza Pública (Guatemala), The Texas Tribune, Univision News, El Periódico (Guatemala), Prensa Libre (Guatemala).

¿Conoces a un niño en un centro de detención o refugio? Ayúdanos a averiguar datos sobre los niños inmigrantes detenidos por el gobierno. https://t.co/I6ZmMfuKEi (vía @ProPublica @UniNoticias) pic.twitter.com/EmAy13Qlp2

— Jose Zamora (@jczamora) June 27, 2018

“We were basically putting calls out to say do you have, or do you know, are you a relative of a separated child?” Thompson said. “When everyone started really focusing on the impact of this policy, one of the things that started becoming clear was that the government wasn’t keeping good track of the kids they were separating and who those kids belonged to. And so we thought it’d be a good public service to begin to try to identify relatives who were missing kids.”

Thompson called Univision their “leading partner” in the social engagement effort. Call-outs for information led to “at least three, and maybe four, families being reunified after reporting by Univision.”

In addition to collaboration with Spanish-language media outlets, ProPublica published its own stories for this investigation in both English and Spanish – in the interest of reaching the people most affected by these stories. “As a result of this series, we brought on sort of a formal team of translators who get most of the stories we write that have anything to do or have any connection or interest to the Latin American community, Spanish-speaking community, and now we translate just about everything, and we have now a Spanish-language page,” Thompson said.

PERSISTENCE

“We wrote about this one girl at the beginning of this [reporting] program and after a few months a lot of readers kept writing me asking, what’s happening, what’s happening, what’s happening now?” Thompson said. “There was a lawsuit that had been filed by the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], and as a result of that lawsuit the government would occasionally have to go before the judge and give a number as to how many kids were left in government custody who were put there because of zero tolerance.”

“In one of the reports that maybe was late August or September, the government reported that they had one child under five left in their care,” Thompson continued. “I decided to go try to find that child, see if I could figure out who that child was, and why they were still in government custody.”

Thompson’s search led her to a father of a 5-year-old who had just turned 6 in custody. “He was very upset that after six months he and his child still hadn’t been reunited,” Thompson explained. “I said, ‘Well, you know you’re one of the last cases because they’re not doing this anymore,’ and he said to me — and he was in a detention facility — he said to me, ‘Nuh-uh, there was a guy who just arrived two days ago who was just separated from his kid last week.’”

Thompson convinced the man on the phone to get this other father to call her. “That’s when I found 4-year-old Brayan who had been separated from his father in August,” Thompson said. It was a big discovery – after reversing their policy, the government was still separating children from their parents at the border. “They said they were only separating people to protect the child from parents who are potentially dangerous to them, parents who had dangerous criminal records, and they had accused the father of being a gang member,” Thompson said. “But our reporting revealed that they didn’t have any evidence to support this allegation and that his father was separated for reasons we still don’t know, but don’t seem justified, because after we reported the story, the government quickly reversed course, released the father, and then reunited them.”

Want to read more? We’ve gathered research on the effects of family separation on children.

The post How they did it: ProPublica investigates ‘zero tolerance’ immigration policy appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

For reporters looking to broaden their immigration coverage, journalist Maria Hinojosa has a recommendation: “I haven’t seen a lot of coverage of immigrant mental health issues for mainstream journalists,” Hinojosa, the executive producer of the long-running NPR show Latino USA, said in a recent interview with Journalist’s Resource.

As it turns out, many public health scholars have been researching the mental health effects of being an immigrant or refugee in America today.

“We don’t always acknowledge the sacrifices that migrants take in leaving their homelands — how they risk so much in terms of safety and stability and opportunity,” said Cindy Sangalang, an assistant professor of social work at California State University, in a phone interview with Journalist’s Resource. “Going on this journey can be at a cost to their mental health, and these things can potentially worsen as other stressors increase once they’re here in the United States.”

In the third week of November, public health professionals from across the country gathered in San Diego for the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting. Among the hundreds of research presentations were several that focused on immigrant mental health. Researchers presented published, peer-reviewed studies and working papers and gave reports on early stage research.

Journalist’s Resource contacted a few scholars presenting at the meeting on the topic of immigrant health. Here, we’ve summarized their research, which covers topics from mental health to participation in health and social services. We also highlight a new working paper on mental health among Muslim college students in the United States. Most of the research has not yet been published in peer-reviewed journals, but, where possible, we’ve linked to publicly accessible versions of the work.

“Trauma, Post-Migration Stress, and Mental Health: A Comparative Analysis of Refugees and Immigrants in the United States”
Sangalang, Cindy; et al. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 2018.

In an interview with Journalist’s Resource, lead author Cindy Sangalang explained that her research was motivated by the “record high” number of displaced migrants around the world. She explained that U.S. legal definitions place distinctions between refugees and immigrants, but in reality now “boundaries are starting to blur.”

“In the context of what’s going on right now, a lot of migrants who might be seen as fleeing for economic reasons might be encountering violence,” Sangalang said, making reference to the fact that refugees are often labeled as such because they are fleeing conflict or persecution.

In light of this context, Sangalang was interested in comparing the experiences of Asian refugees and Latino immigrants both coming to the U.S. Do Latino immigrants report traumas and stresses similar to those experienced by refugees during migration and resettlement?

Analyzing survey and interview responses from over 3,200 respondents, the authors found that Asian refugees and Latino immigrants both experienced pre- and post-migration trauma and associated mental disorders and distress, including depressive disorders.

Further, discrimination increased the risk for mental disorders and distress among both groups. She added that current immigration policies contribute to a “broader climate that facilitates more experiences of discrimination,” which, in turn, could exacerbate mental health concerns.

Sangalang concluded that the findings indicate that pre- and post-migration trauma among immigrants, and Latino immigrants in particular, is more common than previously thought.

“How Does the Election of an Anti-Immigrant Presidential Candidate Affect Health and Social Service Utilization? Findings from Southeast Michigan”
Fleming, Paul J.; et al. University of Michigan School of Public Health working paper, 2018.

This study investigated the effects of the 2016 presidential election on health and social service utilization among immigrants in southeastern Michigan. To do so, the researchers conducted and analyzed 29 in-depth interviews with staff members at two Federally Qualified Health Centers – community health centers that provide care to all people, regardless of income or insurance status. These employees are familiar with the immigrant communities they serve and their concerns. The researchers found that in the weeks after the election, staff perceived a decrease in the number of immigrants using their services. In the year after the election, staff noted downturns that corresponded with immigration enforcement actions within the community. Staff also reported that clients asked about arranging for power of attorney and making plans for the care of their children in the event that they were deported.

In a phone call with Journalist’s Resource, lead author Paul Fleming, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, suggested a few policy interventions to support immigrants’ access to health and social services. He suggested social service agencies and clinics that serve immigrants prioritize creating not only welcoming spaces, but also safe spaces, where protecting clients is the primary goal. Staff should know how to respond to immigration enforcement officers if they arrive at clinics, Fleming said. Further, he suggested, clinics should post signs with critical information in multiple languages and offer the services of interpreters. Fleming said that health and social service agencies should adapt to this new climate of fear by finding new ways to reach clients, including offering services over the phone or through video, using trusted community members at schools, churches or other organizations as a go-between, and expanding or providing transportation. (Allowing immigrants who have entered the country without permission to have driver’s licenses, so that they can drive themselves to critical appointments, is another policy suggestion Fleming made.)

Fleming also noted that clinicians and researchers can influence policy by offering public comment on legislation that could impact immigrant communities. This might involve sharing stories about the effects immigration policies have had on their clients.

“Rise in Mental Health Problems Among Muslim Young Adults in the United States Following the 2016 Election”
Abelson, Sara; et al. University of Michigan School of Public Health working paper, 2018.

This research looks at data collected from the Healthy Minds Study, the largest national study of college student mental health. The Healthy Minds Study has been distributed annually since 2007. It uses a number of standardized mental health questionnaires to measure depression, generalized anxiety and eating disorders. The researchers were interested in the number of responses that corresponded to a clinically moderate-to-severe diagnosis.

More than 107,000 students from 132 colleges and universities participated in the study. At schools with more than 4,000 students, the survey was sent to a random sample of students. At smaller schools, all students were invited to participate.

The data analyzed in this study spans the three semesters prior to and the three semesters following the 2016 presidential election. Author Sara Abelson and her colleagues were interested in changes in reported mental health symptoms for Muslim and non-Muslim college students before and after the election.

What they found was that regardless of religion, students reported significantly worse mental health after the election. However, the prevalence of students with a mental health concern increased more among Muslims than non-Muslims – there was an 11.5 percent increase among Muslims, and a 5.3 percent increase among non-Muslims.

While proving a causal link between the election and worse mental health outcomes among Muslim students is difficult, Abelson said in an interview that “we were not aware of other things happening in that time that would have uniquely driven up the rate among Muslim students.”

She added that more research is needed to understand the intervening mechanisms that have led to increases in mental health concerns among Muslim students. Among the outstanding questions: Is discrimination increasing? How is the climate on campus changing?

She noted that irrespective of the driving mechanism, for doctors, therapists and social workers on campus, this research identifies a key population for further outreach.

“White Privilege: Comparing Fear of Crime, Bullying, Detainment and Deportation between University Students of Color and White University Students”
Grinshteyn, Erin; Couture, Marie-Claude; Valencia-Garcia, Dellanira. APHA annual meeting presentation, 2018.

For this study, conducted in 2017, researchers asked 1,415 students at the University of San Francisco to rate their fear of 11 different crimes and aggressions, as well as bullying, detainment and deportation, on a scale of one to 10, with zero being no fear and 10 indicating maximum fear. They compared the responses of white students with those of students of color. They found that median fear scores were higher for students of color than for white students. For example, students of color were more afraid of hate crimes, hate speech, threats and physical assault. They also had higher median scores for aggregate fear of crime than white students. Proportionally, more students of color reported being afraid of bullying many times a day or every day than white students. A smaller proportion of students of color reported never being afraid of bullying on and off campus as compared with white students. Students of color were also more likely to feel worried about themselves, friends and family being detained and deported.

The research presented did not look at changes in fear over time. However, lead author Erin Grinshteyn, an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco, said in a phone call with Journalist’s Resource that national ratings of fear in general have remained fairly stable since 1980. Meanwhile, crime rates have decreased.

Grinshteyn said this merits further research and analysis to understand why people are afraid. But first and foremost, she believes that fear should be addressed as a public health issue. At present, fear remains something like a specter: felt but unaddressed, she said.

“Trends in Food Insecurity and SNAP Participation Among Immigrant Families of U.S. Born Young Children”
Bovell-Ammon, Allison; et al. APHA annual meeting presentation, 2018.

This research finds that despite their eligibility, many immigrant parents whose children are U.S. citizens do not participate in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps. . The study involved 35,207 mothers who were not born in the U.S. but have children who were.

The findings indicate a sharp decline in participation among immigrant families in the first six months of 2018. In a phone call with Journalist’s Resource, lead researcher Allison Bovell-Ammon said that the findings document a “chilling effect” in immigrant communities in which fear prevents immigrants from accessing social programs despite their continuing eligibility. This matches anecdotal reports from frontline providers, she added.

Bovell-Ammon’s research finds that among foreign-born mothers who had been in the United States for less than five years, SNAP participation stood at 43 percent in 2017. It then dropped to 34.8 percent in the first half of 2018. For families that had been in the U.S. for more than five years, SNAP participation grew to 44.7 percent in 2017 and then dropped to 42.7 percent in 2018.

Meanwhile, food insecurity grew among immigrant families who had been in the United States for less than five years from 9.9 percent in 2007 to 17.8 percent by 2017. It increased from 10.8 percent to 17.5 percent in the same time span among families who had been in the United States for more than five years.

Other research has documented similar effects: A 2018 working paper by Marcella Alsan of Stanford Medical School and Crystal Yang of Harvard Law School finds that enrollment in SNAP and the Affordable Care Act declined among Hispanic U.S. citizens after the Secure Communities immigration enforcement program took effect.

“Food insecurity is associated with poor health outcomes from the prenatal period all the way through old age,” Bovell-Ammon told Journalist’s Resource. “SNAP is effective at reducing food insecurity, which improves health,” she added.

“Undocumented Immigrant Youth are Denied Equitable Access to Higher Education, a Barrier to Better Long-Term Health Outcomes”
Diaz, Mayra; Reyes, Katherine; Cabuslay, Edith. APHA annual meeting presentation, 2018.

The San Mateo County, California Health System conducted focus groups with 55 individuals, most of whom identified as undocumented or preferred not to report their immigration status, in order to understand the impact of immigration laws and the rescinding of the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy on education and health.

Those who participated in the focus groups reported signs of depression and anxiety among children in their community. In particular, they said that older children who previously would have qualified for DACA shared feelings of hopelessness and low self-esteem. Some children are so upset they “refuse to continue their studies,” according to the abstract.

The authors conclude that anti-immigration laws and the rescinding of DACA have had profound negative effects in San Mateo County. They also said lower educational attainment could have public health implications in the future.

The post Mental health issues among immigrants: New research appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Maria Hinojosa is an award-winning journalist best known for her work as anchor and executive producer of the long-running weekly NPR show Latino USA. For the 2018-2019 academic year she is the Walter Shorenstein Media and Democracy Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, of which Journalist’s Resource is a project.

JR recently took the opportunity to sit down with Hinojosa and learn more of her thoughts on reporting on the Latino community and immigration in the current American political climate. “It means as a journalist being prepared to shed your biases, or at least kind of look at them in the light of day,” Hinojosa said.

For reporters looking to broaden their immigration coverage, Hinojosa has a recommendation: stories about mental health issues, which, she says, are widespread among immigrants and the broader Latino community.

“I haven’t seen a lot of coverage of immigrant mental health issues for mainstream journalists,” Hinojosa said. “There has to be an understanding that there is a low-level psychological impact of living in a country… where an administration is actively trying to perform erasure on your existence.”

Telling the story of immigrant mental health requires reporters to establish trust with their sources while also maintaining appropriate boundaries.

“I think, frankly, the only way that I’ve been able to crack this story of immigrant mental health is actually building a tremendous amount of trust. And that takes a lot of time,” she said. “I guess for senior editors that means giving your journalists the opportunity and time to do that and recognize that it’s a valuable part of this story.”

While good reporting requires empathy, active listening and establishing a certain level of intimacy, “covering mental health issues is always a challenge because you have to be careful of boundaries,” Hinojosa said. “I would hate for somebody to think that I am their therapist or I am their best friend… So you have to be careful, right? You’re not giving counsel to them.”

That said, she believes reporters need to heed a tenet often applied to both medicine and journalism: Do no harm. And that may mean giving sources information about mental health resources.

“If you’ve created an open line of communication, this subject then may say, ‘I’m feeling incredibly suicidal today,” she said. “What does a journalist do in that moment? This is a question that I haven’t had to face very often, but my immediate reaction is that when that happens, my part of ‘do no harm’ means I cannot in good conscience let somebody tell me that they’re going to kill themselves and not do anything about it. So there’s a line … I can’t come to your house and hold your hand and get you into the hospital, but I can say, here’s a number to call, you know, please reach out to somebody.”

She added that mental health organizations can also be useful sources to journalists. “There are organizations that are specifically dealing with people of color and mental health issues, and so, you know, go there,” she said.

Hinojosa also offered the following tips for how to avoid common pitfalls in media coverage of the immigrant community – and how to get the story right.

What to avoid: Using common terms (like “illegal immigrants”) that dehumanize broad populations.

“For decades, immigrants in our country have been called by the most respected journalism organizations in our country as being illegal human beings,” she said.

Even after the Associated Press stopped sanctioning the term “illegal immigrant” in 2013 Hinojosa noted that “many news organizations had a big problem with, and still have a big problem with, making a judgement, a statement, about not using that term because they feel that if you don’t use the term ‘illegal immigrant,’ then somehow you are an activist journalist. And that’s where you’re getting it wrong, and the reason why is because a person is not an illegal person, an action is illegal, so from the very basics of grammar it is incorrect.”

How to get it right: Actively challenge these common terms in your reporting, and consider whether there are better descriptions.

“This is a very difficult thing for journalists to do, because we so deeply do not want to be perceived as being political in one way or another,” Hinojosa said. “But I posit that what we are living through today in the United States of America requires a very different kind of mindset than what we might consider normal.”

Along with “illegals,” Hinojosa believes the term “family separation” is a misleading understatement.  “In the case of children being, in quotes, ‘separated,’ this is a government term. For example, families being separated at the border, it’s a government-approved term,” she said. “It is a factual term to describe what is happening, but there’s something else.  It’s actually children being ripped apart from the arms from the hands of their mothers and fathers, it is children being torn apart, it is families being violently divided… These statements that I’m making here are very uncomfortable for every journalist… I, though, am reticent to use the government’s terms to describe what’s going on and I feel that it is precisely my role as an independent journalist to question the terms that these things are being given.”

What to avoid: Contributing to Latino invisibility in the media by missing opportunities to bring immigrants’ stories into your work.

“Ana Maria Archila, who is one of the two women who stood in an elevator and stopped Senator Flake from going up and confirming the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh… is actually an immigrant from Colombia,” Hinojosa noted. “Until we interviewed her… no one had up until that point asked her [about that], even to just say ‘so where were you born, so you’re an immigrant, you speak with an accent,’ not in a bad way, but just to inquire,”  she added.

“It’s just another way in which the immigrant side of a story is made invisible and not important. And I’m not saying it has to be like, oh my gosh, she’s an immigrant, but simply to recognize the complexity of her character… she is just deemed unable to speak for herself in the national news and an opportunity to hear a Latina with an accent talking about her political activism, [is], you know, gone.”

How to get it right: Ask about immigrants’ backgrounds, but be sensitive and accommodating.

“Sometimes I think that journalists feel like they cannot ask about a person’s background,” she said. “I think that part of what journalists have to learn how to do is to ask these questions with a certain level of awareness and sensitivity so the question is not, ‘So, where are you really from?’ but rather, ‘Tell me a little bit more of your backstory.’

“There has to be also an element of sensitivity, because you never know what the immigration status of the person may be, and you have to allow them the opportunity to define themselves how they want to be defined, whether they are undocumented, whether they were being anonymous, whether they have papers, whether they, like me, are immigrants who became American citizens. Allow people to identify themselves to you. And I think that we have to understand now that all bets are off and this is where it’s a very challenging time for journalists in the sense that if people go public with their stories they are at risk… and it adds another layer to our job because, you know, giving anonymity to somebody or changing somebody’s name is a challenge for us, but we have to be willing to play in those spaces or else we will have no immigrant voices.”

In addition to her own LatinoUSA, Hinojosa highlighted the following media outlets for their exemplary work, and also mentioned a few reporters who she considers important sources for immigration coverage:

• Latino Rebels
• NBC News Latino
• Adolfo Flores, BuzzFeed News
• Tina Vazquez, Rewire
• Elise Foley, Huffington Post
• Hannah Drier, ProPublica
• Roque Planas, Huffington Post
• Maria Sachetti, Washington Post

For more about reporting on immigration, check out these tips from Angilee Shah, senior editor for Global Nation.

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Define American is a nonprofit media and culture organization working to change the narrative about immigration in the United States. The organization was founded by Jose Antonio Vargas, a former Washington Post reporter who, seven years ago, revealed his status as an undocumented citizen in a New York Times Magazine essay. Its latest campaign is #SourcesMatter, launching Sept. 22, which pushes the news media to reconsider the ways they achieve balance in stories on immigration. The main message of the campaign: Choose your sources responsibly.

“We started looking at the media as sort of a conduit for mainstreaming and legitimizing some ideas that have traditionally been rooted in hate groups,” said Kristian Ramos, the organization’s communications director, in a recent call with Journalist’s Resource. “Once we started looking at that, we sort of took a step back and started looking at sourcing and the language used.”

Ramos and his colleagues looked at the number of times the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times quoted three organizations that have been criticized heavily by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC): the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and NumbersUSA. Comparing these citations between the first six months of 2016 with the first six months of 2018, they saw a drastic jump – from 16 times to 102.

Two of these groups, FAIR and CIS, are designated as “hate groups” by the SPLC, which defines a hate group as “an organization that – based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities – has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.” The SPLC was founded in 1971 to protect civil rights through the law. As part of their efforts they monitor the activities of over 1,600 extremist groups across the country.

“We’ve seen a real shift in the quoting of these organizations, and in particular an embrace and uncritical use of a lot of terminology that was once considered the language of hate groups,” Ramos said.

Ramos offered the concept of “self-deportation” as an example. “Self-deportation is an idea that comes from the Tanton Network of FAIR, CIS and NumbersUSA,” he said. “It basically means you make the lives of immigrants so awful that they leave the country.” In 2012, when Mitt Romney advanced the policy during a presidential debate, the media “really pounced” on him for using the language, Ramos said. For example, the editorial board of the Washington Post published an op-ed headlined “The ‘self-deportation’ fantasy.”

“Fast forward to 2018, the government of the United States is currently employing a policy of self-deportation and it’s treated as a serious policy — it’s treated as something that is a legitimate policy for the United States, and that includes separating children at the border, that includes a lot of these raids,” Ramos continued.

What changed? “Well, a lot of these groups … a lot of their staff ended up going into the administration,” Ramos said. “And so you have reporters now reporting on the policy of the government, the immigration policy, without being critical or providing analysis of where the policy came from.”

Ramos offered a few tips for reporters on how they can balance their stories with opposing viewpoints – and do so responsibly:

• If you’re looking to balance the viewpoints in your immigration stories, seek quotes from both conservative and liberal organizations – but avoid citing organizations that have been classified as hate groups by the SPLC, Ramos said. For example, he recommended the Cato Institute, the LIBRE Initiative and the Heritage Foundation as organizations with conservative viewpoints that don’t promulgate hate.
• If you must get a comment from someone affiliated with an organization the SPLC characterizes as a hate group, disclose their affiliation in your story, Ramos said.
• If the source also has connections to the White House administration or Congress, make that disclosure, too. At the very minimum, Ramos said, if you can’t disclose that they’re affiliated with a group on SPLC’s list, you should disclose their political connections.
• Consider the origins of terms like “self-deportation” and “chain migration” and what they might be dog whistling (chain migration is a euphemism for family-based migration). “This is sort of a semantics thing, but it’s important for people to know that this language is rooted in hate groups and policies that are designed to keep immigrants from entering the country legally,” Ramos said.

“I think absolutely you should have opposing views and views that are for a policy,” Ramos said. “But I think it’s incumbent upon journalists to do their due diligence and make sure they’re not quoting hate groups in the process, or disclose that they’re a hate group, or disclose that they have ties to the administration, or find another source that has not been labeled a hate group. If you’re going to get a source for a story, the advice would be to do the research on their background in immigration to provide that context for the story.”

Correction:  An earlier version of this article included Numbers USA on a list of organizations classified as “hate groups” by the SPLC.  We regret the error and have updated the article to correct it. 

Looking for more? Journalist’s Resource has additional tips on covering immigration, as well as summaries of studies about hate speech and immigrants’  health. 

Photo by Alex Steffler obtained from Flickr and used under a Creative Commons license.

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As senior editor for Global Nation, the immigration vertical for Public Radio International, Angilee Shah knows how difficult it can be to find information about immigration in the U.S.

Take, for example, immigration court, which is known formally as the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR).

“There’s no PACER for EOIR,” Shah explained, referring to the government-run Public Access to Court Electronic Records system. Rather, EOIR requires journalists to file a Freedom of Information Act request for every individual case.  “Even though some of the findings and some of the rulings that happen at EOIR are extremely punitive or life-changing for people … it operates as an administrative court, which means the records are not open the way they are in our judicial system,” Shah said.

When reporting on immigration, Shah noted, “every single question has a completely different answer about where you might find what you’re looking for, data-wise.” So she made a list and shared it with the public: a Google document with over 70 immigration data sources. She has also created a number of tip sheets that explain how to find stories using these publicly available data sources.

The challenges of reporting on immigration aren’t limited to issues of data access. As with many topics, it’s too easy for reporters to miss important stories. Shah spoke with Journalist’s Resource about what journalists can get wrong when covering immigration, and how they can hone their approach.

WHAT JOURNALISTS GET WRONG: Their stories lack context.

“Even if it’s two sentences giving you a sense of the scale of the issue,” she said, “having just that little bit of context can really help readers understand, you know, whether it’s an isolated incident or something broader.”

HOW TO GET IT RIGHT: Add information that provides historical background.

“Put things in the broader context of the trajectory of our immigration system,” she said. “It’s really tempting, I think, at this moment for journalists to say the Trump administration is doing x, y, z. I think it’s really important for journalists to ask the question, ‘When did this program start?’ Or, ‘When did this issue start?’ Or, ‘Historically is this actually a break in how the United States has treated immigrants?’

“This is not all happening in a vacuum. There’s actually a lot of historical precedent for the immigration impulses we’re seeing now.”

HOW ELSE TO GET IT RIGHT: Drill down on the details in government press releases.

“The other thing that’s important is to ask probing questions about government press releases,” Shah said. “Ask government agencies to clarify the definitions of how they’re counting people, how they’re counting cases, offer specifics to really define those very precisely … Ask the question, ‘Has your definition of this particular stat changed?’ Especially when you see big jumps in numbers.”

For example, “[U.S.] Border Patrol issued this startling statistic about an increase in attacks or aggression against its agents, and it turns out they counted one incident, like, 130 times,” she said. “Normally they’d count it like somebody got into a fistfight with an agent … that would be one act of aggression. They counted every single act in that one event.

WHAT JOURNALISTS GET WRONG: Their stories lack the voices of those most affected by immigration policies.

“About providing context, the corollary to that is making sure you get actual immigrants and people affected into your stories,” she said. “Both of those things are important. Those immigrants might be able to provide you the expertise and the context. Those are not mutually exclusive things, but they both need to be in there, one way or another.

“It’s really important to always talk to people most affected by policies, and a lot of immigration stories … they actually leave out the immigrants who are very affected.”

HOW TO GET IT RIGHT: Show the impact of those policies. 

“I think for our audiences and our readers, it’s really important to see what those policies actually do to people. That doesn’t mean they’re going to say policies are wrong or right, but they’ll at least know what the effect is, and I think that’s really basic and really important.”

WHAT JOURNALISTS GET WRONG: They approach their coverage from a criminal justice angle.

“People expect there to be a paper trail, the way there often is in criminal justice, and in our immigration system, it’s really important to understand that a paper trail is much harder to find, both for individual cases and on the whole of the system,” Shah said. “There are just so many places to go looking for that sort of information, where the government actually puts something on paper.”

HOW TO GET IT RIGHT: Know where to look for information, and how to ask for help.

“Some of the most comprehensive data sets we have about [Immigrations and Customs Enforcement] and EOIR come from TRAC, which I always highlight, because it’s an amazing resource — the Transactional Records Clearinghouse at Syracuse University,” she said, adding that the organization spent years suing for some of the data sets it now shares with the public.

“So, what I’ll say is, make your FOIA request, make your appeal if you’re not getting the information that you think you should and should be public, but know that it’s an uphill battle, and you’re going to depend on these other organizations to fight those battles.

“Between TRAC and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, those have been the most successful places to get big data sets. Once in a while news organizations have been able to get them too, but it’s a long assessment, often, if you’re looking for big anonymized data sets.”

WHAT JOURNALISTS GET WRONG: They parachute in just to cover immigration crises, to the exclusion of broader immigration coverage.

“It’s an error to only talk to people when there’s a crisis or when there’s violence,” Shah said. “I think it’s really important to just spend time, to understand people.

“I think a lot of people think of immigration coverage as immigration system coverage. It’s more than that.

“Our immigration system is government agencies and how people interact with them. It’s about legislation and politics. It’s about trade, often the economic story.

“I think immigration, in terms of an actual concept, is about pop culture. It’s about food. It’s about language and education and health care. It’s about all parts of this country which immigrants affect and touch, which is everywhere.”

HOW TO GET IT RIGHT: Outside of assignments, get to know the community.

“Go hang out at the churches, go hang out at the masjids,” she said. “Spend time there. A lot of people are really, really generous even if you’re not working on a story.”

HOW ELSE TO GET IT RIGHT: For news organizations, better coverage starts with diverse hiring.

“Maybe that’s a broader sort of word of caution to news organizations, which is to not parachute journalists into communities or places — either cities or cultures — that they are unfamiliar with,” Shah said. “Which means having a diverse staff is really, really important for good immigration coverage. Having language capacity is important for immigration coverage. That the lives of immigrants are not an oddity to the person covering stories about them.”

HOW ELSE TO GET IT RIGHT: Look beyond politics and border control; immigration touches many beats.

“Immigration or immigrants is such a broad category,” Shah said. “You could, I don’t know, open up Netflix and look at the international section. You’ll find all these people in the U.S. making this content; that’s an immigration story in a way, too. Or even that Netflix has deals with international production houses; that’s a story about immigration in a lot of ways as well.

“And I think those stories get missed because journalists follow politics very closely. It’s important to understand how people actually live as well, and change the U.S., and how the U.S. changes them.

“Immigration could be a part of almost every beat, or arguably, every beat in the United States. I can’t think of something that isn’t touched by immigration.

“If you look at immigration only from covering politics or only from covering government agencies, then you miss a whole, major part of what immigrants’ lives are actually like, and what their contributions or their effects on U.S. society actually are.”

For reporters looking for starting points on the immigration data sources document, Shah highlighted a few key resources:

• In addition to TRAC and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, Shah pointed out the Migration Policy Institute: “The Migration Policy Institute has excellent studies all the time, and they have an awesome set of resources as well; they have this mega guide to immigration data resources.”
• She also noted the Immigration History Research Center and Densho, an archive focused on accounts from Japanese people and Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during World War II, as valuable historical resources.

Beyond the list, Shah suggested that immigration law clinics, often operated by local university law schools, can be helpful: “I’ve found some of those professors to be amongst the most generous people in terms of explaining things to journalists,” she said.

She also pointed out a few examples of media outlets doing great reporting on the subject of immigration, with the caveat that many other places are doing good work, too: “Often they’re local places, niche sites that are covering communities that have been ignored for a long time,” she said.

Her picks include:

• Global Nation and PRI’s The World (of course!)
• The Dallas Morning News
• NBC News Asian America
• Remezcla, a Latino media outlet.
• The Root, which highlights black perspectives.

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Enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Affordable Care Act declined among Hispanic citizens of the United States after the Secure Communities program took effect, a working paper by Marcella Alsan of Stanford Medical School and Crystal Yang of Harvard Law School finds.

Secure Communities is an immigration enforcement program enacted by the Obama administration that ran from 2008 to 2014 and was reinstated in 2017. The program, which is run by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), cross-checks fingerprints of individuals arrested by state and local law enforcement with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to determine their immigration status. Given probable cause, ICE can then issue a detainer, which authorizes local or state law enforcement to hold the individual for subsequent apprehension.

According to statistics from ICE, between fiscal year 2009 and 2014, over 375,000 unauthorized citizens were deported as a result of the program. “Removals under the Obama administration’s implementation of S[ecure] C[ommunities] comprised 20 percent of the approximately two million total removals during the time period,” the authors write.

They hypothesized that fear spawned by Secure Communities might affect participation in social programs like SNAP among Hispanic citizens.

SNAP, which is run by the United States federal government, helps address the issue of limited access to food. Formerly known as food stamps, the program offers low-income adults Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) cards, a form of debit payment that can be used to purchase groceries at SNAP-authorized retailers.

“Immigration enforcement may affect take-up because SNAP applications routinely ask for the names and Social Security numbers of all persons in the household applying for benefits,” the authors write. In other words, Hispanic citizens of the U.S. might be afraid to apply for benefits because of associations with unauthorized family members.

The authors continue, “Almost all states assure applicants their information will only be used to determine eligibility and will not be shared with ICE for immigration enforcement.” However, the Washington Post has reported anecdotal evidence to suggest that some choose to forgo benefits because of deportation fears.

Similarly, the Affordable Care Act, which expanded access to health insurance after it was enacted in 2010, collects personal information about citizenship status for all household members. However, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services note that families of mixed immigration status are not required to disclose the status of family members not applying for coverage; further, they note this omission is not grounds for denial of benefits.

Despite these assurances, the researchers found declines in enrollment for these programs among Hispanic citizens. They looked at data on over two million detainers issued between 2008 and 2013, along with data about SNAP and ACA enrollment. They examined changes in enrollment before and after the Secure Communities program as it was rolled out in communities across the nation, with a focus on differences in race and ethnicity.

They found:

• In the years following the activation of Secure Communities, “Hispanic citizen heads of household reduce their take-up of food stamps by 14.5 to 17.2 percentage points relative to non-Hispanics, a 34 to 41 percent decrease from the pre-period Hispanic mean of 42.2 percent.”
• Similar trends held for ACA sign-ups. “We find that a ten percent increase in detainers is associated with a 2.0 percentage point reduction in Hispanic ACA sign-up,” the authors write.
• Declines in enrollment were largest in areas with a higher proportion of mixed-status Hispanic households (homes with both citizens and unauthorized residents). This indicates that fear might play a role in explaining these changes, according to the authors.
• In sanctuary cities, where detainers are not enforced, there was “almost no detectable effect” on participation in these programs after Secure Communities activation.
• There were larger participation decreases in these benefit programs in areas with “a higher incidence of detainers issued for low-level arrests,” as well as in areas with “greater increases in deportation fear,” as measured by survey data. The authors interpret this evidence as lending support to their hypothesis that deportation fears might drive these reductions.

The authors considered information gaps as an alternate explanation for the observed phenomenon. “Reducing the number of co-ethnics who sign up for a program could leave affected groups poorly informed about benefits,” they write. However, they determined that Hispanic households that had previously used food stamps “substantially reduced” their participation after implementation of Secure Communities. They take this to discredit the idea that information gaps might explain reduced enrollment among Hispanic households. They were not able to find a relationship between employment rates and changes in program participation either.

The authors conclude that “deportation fear may play an important role in explaining some of the uptake gap for Hispanic Americans, with potentially adverse long-term consequences for the health and well-being of Hispanic families.” Lower enrollment in these programs among Hispanics might have even wider implications: “Since Hispanics tend to have better health outcomes than similarly situated low-income whites or blacks,” the authors write, “their reduced participation in [ACA] could translate into higher premiums for other demographic groups. Most broadly, our results reveal that safety net programs interact with other government policies, yielding potentially unexpected results for families.”

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Immigrants to the United States who are not citizens are more likely to have worse oral health compared to natives and naturalized citizens, according to new research published in the Journal of the American Dental Association.

The study, conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Nebraska, University of Wisconsin, City University of New York and University of Alabama, looked at national survey data on oral health. The researchers analyzed information collected on 4,520 adults who received a dental exam. The analysis focused on associations between citizenship status and whether patients received recommendations to visit a dental professional, had cavities or periodontal disease.

The researchers point out that the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which prohibits the federal government from funding Medicare, Medicaid and other programs to cover undocumented immigrants, limits their access to medical assistance. And while some states offer access to these programs regardless of immigration status, dental care generally is not part of this coverage. With these facts in mind, the researchers sought to identify the extent to which differences in oral health, which is important not only in its own right, but also as an indicator of broader physical health, exist along the lines of citizenship status.

They found:

• Over half of noncitizens had periodontal disease and nearly 40 percent had cavities. By contrast, 34 percent of native citizens had periodontal disease and 27 percent had cavities. On average, the noncitizen group was seven years younger than the natives studied.
• Adjusting for a number of factors, including smoking status and number of permanent teeth, noncitizens still had higher odds of periodontal disease and were more likely to receive a recommendation to visit a dentist.
• Naturalized citizens were not significantly more likely to have periodontal disease or cavities than natives.
• Insurance might be a mitigating factor with respect to these disparities — after adjusting for insurance status, differences between natives and noncitizens were no longer significant. In the pool studied, over half of the noncitizens did not have any health insurance.
• The researchers conclude that immigration reform might lessen disparities, since citizens have broader access to federal and state medical assistance.
• A limitation of the study is that the dataset does not offer information on the patients’ past dental exams or clinical history. The researchers write this lack of information makes it impossible to trace the factors that contribute to disparities in oral health.

For more research on disparities and health equity, we have written about hepatitis C, asthma and medical interventions in non-traditional settings.

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