Department of Health, Society, and Behavior, Program in Public Health, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, United States of America.
Department of Sociology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2021 Feb 2;16(2):e0246239. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0246239. eCollection 2021.
Undocumented status is widely recognized as an important social determinant of health. While undocumented immigrants have lower levels of health care access, they do not have consistently poorer physical health than the US-born or other immigrant groups. Furthermore, heterogeneity by race/ethnicity has been largely ignored in this growing literature. This paper used the 2001, 2004, 2008 panels of the restricted Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), one of the only representative surveys equipped to adequately identify Asian undocumented immigrants, to compare health patterns between Asians and Latinos by immigration status. We examined three general measures of health/health access: self-rated health, disability, and current health insurance. Latino undocumented immigrants displayed some advantages in self-rated health and disability but had lower insurance coverage compared to US-born Latinos. In contrast, Asian undocumented immigrants did not differ from US-born Asians in any of the three outcomes. While undocumented status has been proposed as a fundamental cause of disease, we found no evidence that Latino and Asian undocumented immigrants consistently fare worse in health access or physical health outcomes than immigrants in other status categories. Different racial groups also appeared to have unique patterns between immigration status and health outcomes from one another.
身份不合法被广泛认为是影响健康的一个重要社会决定因素。尽管无证移民获得医疗服务的机会较少，但他们的身体健康状况并不一定比美国出生者或其他移民群体差。此外，在这一不断发展的文献中，种族/民族的异质性在很大程度上被忽视了。本文利用受限收入和参与项目调查（SIPP）的 2001、2004 和 2008 年小组数据，这是唯一具有代表性的调查之一，能够充分识别亚洲无证移民，比较了无证移民和合法移民之间的健康模式。我们考察了健康/健康服务获取的三个一般衡量标准：自我评估健康状况、残疾和当前健康保险。无证拉丁裔移民在自我评估健康状况和残疾方面表现出一些优势，但与美国出生的拉丁裔相比，他们的保险覆盖率较低。相比之下，无证亚洲移民在这三个结果中与美国出生的亚洲人没有区别。虽然无证身份被认为是疾病的根本原因，但我们没有发现无证拉丁裔和亚洲移民在健康服务获取或身体健康结果方面始终比其他身份类别的移民差的证据。不同的种族群体之间在移民身份和健康结果之间似乎也存在独特的模式。
