Hitting Closer to Home: State Policies’ Impacts on Immigrant Health
Adriana Reyes1, Tatiana Padilla
1Cornell University
State policy contexts have become increasingly important for health outcomes and the proliferation of inclusionary and exclusionary immigration related state policies has led to varying state climates for immigrants. We use this divergence in state policy contexts to test the relationship between state-level immigration policies and four health outcomes. We include 15 state policies related to immigration to capture the state climate for immigrants. Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation, a nationally-representative study of households in the U.S.,  we estimate multilevel regression models to assess the role of state policy contexts for the health of immigrants. We also plan to examine differential effects of the policy climate among immigrants, by examining differences by citizenship status and region of origin. We anticipate that more restrictive immigration policies may be detrimental to the health and healthcare access of immigrants, especially non-citizens.