Research shows that health care use among Latino immigrants is adversely affected by restrictive immigration policy. A core concern is that immigrants shy away from sharing personal information in response to policies that expand bureaucratic monitoring of citizenship status across service-providing organizations. This investigation addresses the concern that immigration politics also negatively influences health care utilization among Latino US citizens. One implication is that health insurance expansions may not reduce health care inequities among Latinos due to concern about exposure to immigration law enforcement authorities. Using data from the 2015 Latino National Health and Immigration Survey, we examine the extent to which the politics of immigration deters individuals from going to health care providers and service-providing institutions. Results indicate that Latino US citizens are less likely to make an appointment to see a health care provider when the issue of immigration is mentioned. Additionally, Latino US citizens who know someone who has been deported are more inclined to perceive that information shared with health care providers is not secure. We discuss how cautious citizenship, or risk-avoidance behaviors toward public institutions in order to avoid scrutiny of citizenship status, informs debates about reducing health care inequities.
To what extent do people become less trusting of the government under threatening policy contexts? The authors find evidence that Secure Communities, a bureaucratic program that enhances immigrant policing through collaboration between local law and immigration enforcement agencies, spurs mistrust among Latinos but not non‐Latinos. This article focuses on the politics of immigration and health, two issue areas marked by large‐scale bureaucratic developments over the last 50 years. The authors argue that a major consequence of expanding immigrant policing is its trickle‐down effect on how individuals view public institutions charged with the provision of public goods, such as health information. The results indicate that Latinos in locales where immigrant policing is most intense express lower levels of trust in government as a source of health information. Through a policy feedback lens, the findings suggest that the state's deployment of immigrant policing conveys more widespread lessons about the trustworthiness of government.
Throughout the 2016 US presidential campaign and the first 2 years of his presidency, Donald Trump has repeatedly dehumanized immigrants in pursuit of more restrictive immigration policies. Despite the common perception that this threat should increase the political mobilization of Latino voters, existing research has yielded mixed findings. In this article, we argue that attention has to be paid to both threatening climate and mobilization. We examine Latino voting in the 2018 midterm election using both aggregate election data from 2014 and 2018 as well as a large 10-week tracking poll (n=2767) of Latinos during the last 2 months of the 2018 election. We show that, compared to 2014, the number of ballots cast by Latinos increased substantially. Using the tracking poll, however, we show that threat alone did not appear to be sufficient to mobilize Latino voters in the 2018 election. It is threat combined with mobilization, rather, that increased Latino voting. We discuss implications for future Latino political participation in the US.
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