Caitlin Patler (
Erin Hamilton is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California Davis.
Health Aff (Millwood). 2019 May;38(5):738-745. doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.2018.05495.
Undocumented immigrants and their children have worse self-reported health than documented immigrants and US citizens do. Evidence suggests that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which was created in 2012 by President Barack Obama and which granted some rights to undocumented immigrants who arrived as children, improved the well-being of recipients and their children in the first three years after the program's introduction. However, DACA is subject to executive discretion, and the US presidential campaign that began in 2015 introduced substantial uncertainty regarding the program's future. We examined whether DACA's health benefits persisted beyond 2015 using the 2007-17 waves of the California Health Interview Survey and dynamic treatment effects models. Our results show that self-reported health improved for Latina/o DACA-eligible immigrants and their children from 2012 to 2015 but worsened after 2015. Our results suggest that the political climate of the 2016 presidential election may have underscored the politically contingent nature of the DACA program and eroded the program's health benefits for eligible immigrants and their children.
无证移民及其子女的自我报告健康状况比有证移民和美国公民差。有证据表明，2012 年由巴拉克·奥巴马总统创建的“童年入境暂缓遣返”（DACA）计划，为那些作为儿童抵达美国的无证移民授予了一些权利，该计划在推出后的头三年改善了受益者及其子女的福祉。然而，DACA 受制于行政裁量权，2015 年开始的美国总统竞选活动对该计划的未来带来了重大的不确定性。我们使用 2007-17 年加利福尼亚健康访谈调查和动态治疗效果模型，研究了 DACA 的健康效益是否在 2015 年之后持续存在。研究结果表明，自 2012 年至 2015 年，拉丁裔 DACA 合格移民及其子女的自我报告健康状况有所改善，但 2015 年之后则恶化。研究结果表明，2016 年总统选举的政治氛围可能突显了 DACA 计划的政治附带性质，并削弱了该计划对合格移民及其子女的健康效益。
