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The controversies that frequently arise in matters of immigration throughout the American Union, significantly affect the mental health of the Latino community in the United States, including native citizens, according to a new study.
The new research, published Feb. 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that foreign-born Latinos living in the United States, including those with U.S. citizenship, reported more anxiety and depression during times of heightened immigration enforcement between 2011 and 2018.
The study focused on measuring feelings of anxiety and depression in Latinos who were not citizens, naturalized citizens, and U.S.-born citizens. It recorded participants' responses to monthly surveys about changes in immigration policy, law enforcement, and public interest to better understand the effects these had on Latinos' mental health.
“As a group, Latinos are racialized by public policy, by the implementation of public policy, and by political rhetoric in the United States,” said Asad L. Asad, assistant professor of sociology in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences and senior author of the study.
"Latinos, considered undocumented or 'illegal' in the United States, feel threatened by deportation, even when they are citizens and presumably immune to it," the expert said.
The study also measured enforcement by the number of detainer notices sent by federal authorities to police departments across the country asking them to hold noncitizens for possible deportation.
According to the document, Latino citizens born in the United States also expressed greater psychological distress in response to immigration issues.
And according to their psychological distress scores, they were more closely related to increased public attention to immigration (measured as the volume of related Google searches) than to actual increases in enforcement.
The study said anxiety and depression levels were measured using the Kessler-6 Psychological Distress Scale, administered regularly through the National Health Interview Survey program to a representative sample of long-term U.S. residents aged 18 years and older.
Higher scores on the questionnaire indicate greater psychological distress, either from anxiety, depression, or both.
“If you’re a Latino American citizen, maybe your mental health still feels fine when deportations are increasing nationally because you’re not directly vulnerable to deportation. But that doesn’t make you immune to the broader racist conversation that comes up when, for example, some politicians describe Latinos, as an ethnic group, in a negative way,” Asad said. “You start to internalize that as you go about your daily life.”
Political debates affect individual mental health outcomes
Asad’s research and recent book Engage and Evade (Princeton University Press, 2023) focus on how institutional categories, such as citizenship, influence people’s mental, physical, economic, and social well-being.
In a previous article I showed that fear of deportation was trending upward among Latino citizens, while it remained high but stable among non-citizens.
In this recently published study, Asad and colleagues set out to understand how a changing political environment can influence mental health.
Initially, researchers expected that major immigration-related events, such as the Obama administration's 2012 announcement of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program or Donald Trump's rise to the presidency in 2016 after campaigning to repeal it, would reduce or increase depression and anxiety.
“We predicted that these major events would have very clear relationships to Latino psychological distress, but we found that they didn’t matter as much as we thought,” Asad said.
Although Asad and colleagues observed more psychological distress among noncitizen Latinos after the 2016 election, they showed that the everyday immigration environment was more closely linked to mental health than salient events.
The analysts detailed that when quantifying the overall immigration enforcement environment each month, the threat of deportation negatively impacts individuals even when they are not at risk of deportation.
“Our work shows that a deportation-focused approach is psychologically damaging to non-citizens and even to U.S. citizens,” Asad said.
The research does not suggest that increases in anxiety and depression were uniquely Latino or immigration-related problems. Accounts of rising anxiety abound, blaming everything from technology and climate change to political polarization, and Asad and his colleagues acknowledge this general trend in their paper.
“We very much live in an age of anxiety,” Assad added.
The research showed that psychological distress increased between 2011 and 2018 among Latinos overall and among non-Hispanic white and black populations born in the United States.
The researchers considered these latter populations as comparison groups “neither vulnerable nor targeted for deportation.” The increasing psychological distress in the comparison groups did not align with increased immigration enforcement or public debate as it did in the Latino groups.
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