The Unintended Public Health Consequences of Immigration Policing

From the Trump administration’s promise to build a wall along the Mexican border to the separation of children from migrants attempting to enter the U.S., issues related to immigration policy have dominated American politics. Recent proposals by the Trump administration have attempted to restrict legal immigration by requiring green card applicants to prove they are unlikely to become “public charges”—a term used to describe individuals reliant on any government benefits. These proposals demonstrate an intersection between immigration and social policy, as many immigrants must now weigh the consequences of using public benefits on their ability to obtain permanent residency.

Immigrant communities have long been aware of coordination between immigration enforcement agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other government bodies. Scholars have observed that such coordination can result in a phenomenon known as the “chilling effect,” in which vulnerable populations become reluctant to share potentially incriminating personal information for the purposes of obtaining public services. In a recent paper for Public Administration Review, Vanessa Cruz Nichols, Alana M. W. LeBrón, and Francisco I. Pedraza examined the ways in which immigration policies might “spill over” and inadvertently impact public health outcomes.

Nichols, LeBrón, and Pedraza looked specifically at ICE’s Secure Communities program (“SComm”) to measure the impact of local immigrant policing on individuals’ trust of government health information. Borrowing from Coleman and Stuess (2014), the authors defined immigrant policing as “the policing and surveillance of immigrant communities in public spaces by local law enforcement in collaboration with federal immigration authorities,” and measured it using SComm administrative data. The purpose of SComm is to use arrests as an opportunity to identify non-citizens who are targets for deportation by running arrested individuals’ fingerprints through an ICE database at the time of arrest. Because police run the fingerprints at the time of arrest, individuals may be identified and targeted for deportation before they have been convicted of—or even charged with—a crime.

The researchers then used responses to the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) to assess the relationship between immigrant policing (specifically, the level of enforcement of SComm) and trust in government health information. Using the HINTS question, “In general, how much do you trust information about health or medical topics from governmental health agencies?”, the researchers observed a strong association between immigrant policing and mistrust of government health information among Latinos. More specifically, after normalizing survey responses to account for potentially confounding factors, the authors found that immigrant policing negatively impacted Latinos’ trust in government health information. Even after accounting for other characteristics that could potentially impact trust in government health information (education, language proficiency, age, etc.), the authors still found that immigrant policing negatively impacted trust of government health information. Latinos subject to immigrant policing were 20 percent less likely to trust government health information compared to Latinos not subject to immigrant policing. Interestingly, this finding held even for Latinos born in the U.S., who would not face deportation as a result of SComm. This result implies that the negative spillover effects of policies such as SComm may reach beyond the direct targets of immigrant policing to citizen friends and family members.

This study has far-reaching consequences for American health policy. Latinos’ participation in health insurance exchanges and willingness to receive preventative care, such as flu vaccinations, are essential to the broader community’s public health outcomes, as they influence the cost of insurance premiums and the spread of infectious diseases. Though SComm was not intended as a public health policy, it has had spillover effects on Latinos’ trust of government-provided health information. Furthermore, while immigration enforcement measures are intended to target violators of immigration policy, they also impact the citizen community. As immigration policy continues to evolve, legislators and public officials in all areas of policy should be wary of potential spillover effects. These effects may impact the viability of other policy initiatives and extend to voting members of their constituencies.

Article source: Nichols, Vanessa Cruz, Alana M. W. Lebrón, and Francisco I. Pedraza. “Spillover Effects: Immigrant Policing and Government Skepticism in Matters of Health for Latinos.” Public Administration Review 78, No. 3 (2018): 432-43.

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