Misinformation -- such as that a person needs a passport to receive medical attention -- can make immigrant moms reluctant to interact with doctors and hospitals.
Immigrants make up nearly 16% of Philadelphia’s population of 1.6 million, according to a 2024 report from Pew Charitable Trusts. Pew reports this marks the largest percentage since the 1940s, and above the national percentage of 13.9%.
In 2021, working with community partners Puentes de Salud and Maternity Care Coalition, my research team interviewed 24 Latina immigrant mothers in Philadelphia and the Kennett Square area. Kennett Square is about 45 miles outside Philadelphia, and its large mushroom industry draws many immigrant laborers.
All of the mothers we interviewed had been pregnant during or after the new public charge rules went into effect during the Trump administration. These new rules mandated, for the first time ever, that receiving public benefits like Medicaid and food assistance might make an immigrant ineligible for permanent residency.
Although the final rule change did not go into effect until February 2020, an executive order describing the changes was leaked in early 2017 and received significant attention from national media and researchers.
Our paper, published in the June 2024 edition of the peer-reviewed journal Medical Care, discusses ways to overcome this chilling effect and improve health care for Philadelphia’s large and growing immigrant community.
Four years later, a study in Texas found that immigrant Latina women made fewer and later prenatal visits starting midway through the 2015 presidential campaign and through the first two years of the Trump administration.
In Maryland, researchers looked at how adults and children who were presumed to be undocumented accessed health care after the 2016 presidential election. They found decreases in primary care visits among both adults and children. And there was an uptick in missed preventive pediatric visits among children of immigrant mothers in Boston, Minneapolis and Little Rock, Arkansas, both after the 2016 election and after the expanded public charge rules were leaked to the press.
Consequences of less preventive care
How this chilling effect may impact overall public health is also becoming more apparent.
In the Maryland study mentioned above, researchers found that the rate of annual emergency room visits among the children in the study more than doubled. This suggests that medical issues that could have been addressed in a pediatrician’s office during preventive visits became more urgent and families ended up seeking emergency care.
In addition, one study estimated there were 2,337 more preterm births than would be expected among Latina mothers in the U.S. in the year after the 2016 presidential election.
Given what they controlled for in their analyses, the researchers concluded the increase was possibly related to added stress among this group around the election, perhaps secondary to fears around anti-immigration legislation, xenophobic rhetoric and increased deportations.
Immigrants make up nearly 16% of Philadelphia’s population of 1.6 million, according to a 2024 report from Pew Charitable Trusts. Pew reports this marks the largest percentage since the 1940s, and above the national percentage of 13.9%.
In 2021, working with community partners Puentes de Salud and Maternity Care Coalition, my research team interviewed 24 Latina immigrant mothers in Philadelphia and the Kennett Square area. Kennett Square is about 45 miles outside Philadelphia, and its large mushroom industry draws many immigrant laborers.
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