Protecting unauthorized immigrant mothers improves their children’s mental health
Life under threat of deportation
What is the effect on a child of having parents who are at risk of deportation as unauthorized immigrants? Hainmueller et al. developed a quasi-experimental protocol to address this complicated question. They selected mothers who had birthdates either just before or just after the cutoff for the United States' Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Children whose mothers were protected from deportation by DACA had 50% fewer diagnoses of adjustment and anxiety disorder than children with mothers whose birthdates, by coincidence, preceded the cutoff and who thus were not protected.
Science, this issue p. 1041
Abstract
The United States is embroiled in a debate about whether to protect or deport its estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants, but the fact that these immigrants are also parents to more than 4 million U.S.-born children is often overlooked. We provide causal evidence of the impact of parents’ unauthorized immigration status on the health of their U.S. citizen children. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program granted temporary protection from deportation to more than 780,000 unauthorized immigrants. We used Medicaid claims data from Oregon and exploited the quasi-random assignment of DACA eligibility among mothers with birthdates close to the DACA age qualification cutoff. Mothers’ DACA eligibility significantly decreased adjustment and anxiety disorder diagnoses among their children. Parents’ unauthorized status is thus a substantial barrier to normal child development and perpetuates health inequalities through the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage.
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Supplementary Material
Summary
Materials and Methods
Supplementary Text
Figs. S1 to S13
Tables S1 to S17
Preregistered Analysis Plan
Resources
References and Notes
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Copyright © 2017 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.
This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.
History
Received: 5 May 2017
Accepted: 1 August 2017
31 August 2017
Acknowledgments
This research was funded by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation (grant no. 93-16-12). We also acknowledge funding from the Ford Foundation for operational support of the Stanford Immigration Policy Lab. For helpful advice, we thank K. Bansak, V. G. Carrion, A. Hainmueller, and J. Wang. Replication code is available through Harvard Dataverse (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/8EEDAP). A preregistered analysis plan is available at the Evidence and Governance in Politics website under study ID 20170227AC (http://egap.org/design-registrations). The analysis plan is also reprinted in the supplementary materials. The Institutional Review Boards at Stanford University (protocol 40907) and Oregon Health & Science University (protocol 15633) approved this research.
Authors
Funding Information
Ford Foundation: award313652
Russell Sage Foundation: award313651, 93-16-12
