Omnibus or Ominous immigration laws? Immigration policy and mental health of the Hispanic population

Abstract

Since the passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) that tried to curb unauthorized immigration in the U.S., a number of states passed single immigration laws to control unauthorized immigration. Such laws (e.g., 287(g) agreements with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, E-Verify mandates, Secure Communities (SC) program) started to be implemented in the 2000s and studies (e.g., Bohn et al., 2014;Kostandini et al., 2014) find that they have decreased the share of non-citizen Hispanics in the states that passed those laws. Omnibus Immigration Laws (OIL) are also state laws, but compared to single immigration laws, are passed and implemented as a package covering a range of activities, including employment eligibility verification, public benefit access bans, and police enforcement authority expansion through "show me

Race, criminalization and urban mental health in the United States

“…SB1070 empowers local law enforcement to detain any person who is suspected of having ‘unlawful’ immigration status. A growing body of quantitative literature has begun investigating the impact of such laws on mental health [49,55–57,58 ▪ ], though a lack of robust measures of mental health are a common limitation of this literature. Using data from the biennial Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System, investigators found evidence of increased reported past-day sadness for Hispanic students in Arizona ( n = 3402) following the enactment of SB1070, relative to Hispanic students in other states ( n = 64 225) [58 ▪ ].…”