Immigration and health care are hotly debated and contentious issues. Policies that relate to both issues—to the health of newcomers—often reflect misimpressions about immigrants, and their impact on health care systems. Despite the fact that immigrants are typically younger and healthier than natives, and that many immigrants play a vital role as care-givers in their new lands, native citizens are often reluctant to extend basic health care to immigrants, choosing instead to let them suffer, to let them die prematurely, or to expedite their return to their home lands. Likewise, many nations turn against immigrants when epidemics such as Ebola strike, under the false belief that native populations can be kept well only if immigrants are kept out. In The Health of Newcomers, Patricia Illingworth and Wendy E. Parmet demonstrate how shortsighted and dangerous it is to craft health policy on the basis of ethnocentrism and xenophobia. Because health is a global public good and people benefit from the health of neighbor and stranger alike, it is in everyone’s interest to ensure the health of all. Drawing on rigorous legal and ethical arguments and empirical studies, as well as deeply personal stories of immigrant struggles, Illingworth and Parmet make the compelling case that global phenomena such as poverty, the medical brain drain, organ tourism, and climate change ought to inform the health policy we craft for newcomers and natives alike.

Since 1965 the foreign-born population of the United States has swelled from 9.6 million or 5 percent of the population to 45 million or 14 percent in 2015. Today, about one-quarter of the U.S. population consists of immigrants or the children of immigrants. Given the sizable representation of immigrants in the U.S. population, their health is a major influence on the health of the population as a whole. On average, immigrants are healthier than native-born Americans. Yet, immigrants also are subject to the systematic marginalization and discrimination that often lead to the creation of health disparities. To explore the link between immigration and health disparities, the Roundtable on the Promotion of Health Equity held a workshop in Oakland, California, on November 28, 2017. This summary of that workshop highlights the presentations and discussions of the workshop.

From an award-winning journalist comes a fascinating exploration of the life-enhancing customs that immigrant groups have brought with them to the U.S. and of how Americans can improve their lives by adapting them.

The lore of the immigrant who comes to the United States to take advantage of our welfare system has a long history in America's collective mythology, but it has little basis in fact. The so-called problem of immigrants on the dole was nonetheless a major concern of the 1996 welfare reform law, the impact of which is still playing out today. While legal immigrants continue to pay taxes and are eligible for the draft, welfare reform has severely limited their access to government supports in times of crisis. Edited by Michael Fix, Immigrants and Welfare rigorously assesses the welfare reform law, questions whether its immigrant provisions were ever really necessary, and examines its impact on legal immigrants' ability to integrate into American society. Immigrants and Welfare draws on fields from demography and law to developmental psychology. The first part of the volume probes the politics behind the welfare reform law, its legal underpinnings, and what it may mean for integration policy. Contributor Ron Haskins makes a case for welfare reform's ultimate success but cautions that excluding noncitizen children (future workers) from benefits today will inevitably have serious repercussions for the American economy down the road. Michael Wishnie describes the implications of the law for equal protection of immigrants under the U.S. Constitution. The second part of the book focuses on empirical research regarding immigrants' propensity to use benefits before the law passed, and immigrants' use and hardship levels afterwards. Jennifer Van Hook and Frank Bean analyze immigrants' benefit use before the law was passed in order to address the contested sociological theories that immigrants are inclined to welfare use and that it slows their assimilation. Randy Capps, Michael Fix, and Everett Henderson track trends before and after welfare reform in legal immigrants' use of the major federal benefit programs affected by the law. Leighton Ku looks specifically at trends in food stamps and Medicaid use among noncitizen children and adults and documents the declining health insurance coverage of noncitizen parents and children. Finally, Ariel Kalil and Danielle Crosby use longitudinal data from Chicago to examine the health of children in immigrant families that left welfare. Even though few states took the federal government's invitation with the 1996 welfare reform law to completely freeze legal immigrants out of the social safety net, many of the law's most far-reaching provisions remain in place and have significant implications for immigrants. Immigrants and Welfare takes a balanced look at the politics and history of immigrant access to safety-net supports and the ongoing impacts of welfare. Copublished with the Migration Policy Institute

Traces the lives of twenty-two immigrant teens throughout the course of a year at Denver's South High School who attended a specially created English Language Acquisition class and who were helped to adapt through strategic introductions to American culture.

This book outlines the various psychosocial impacts of immigration on cultural identity and its impact on mainstream culture. It examines how cultural identity fits into individual mental health and has to be taken into account in treatment.

This book provides a framework to guide mental health providers who work with refugees and immigrants. Nearly 70 million people today are refugees or forcibly-displaced migrants. More than half of them are children suffering from the effects of dislocation and violence. The authors describe the unique needs and challenges of serving these populations, and offer concrete steps for providing evidence-based, culturally-responsive care. Using the socioecological model, the authors conceptualize the developing child as living within concentric circles that include family, school, neighborhood, and society, embedded within a cultural context. Mental health providers identify and provide targeted support to combat disruptions within any or all of these ecological layers. Chapters examine the complex ways in which culture impacts the refugee experience, barriers to engagement in mental health practice and strategies for overcoming them, assessment, collaborative and integrated mental health interventions, and efforts to increase resilience in children, families, and communities. The book is an essential guide for mental health providers, and all who seek to help children in need.

Traces the American tradition of suspicion of the unassimilated, from the cholera outbreak of the 1830s through the great waves of immigration that began in the 1890s, to the recent past, when the erroneous association of Haitians with the AIDS virus brought widespread panic and discrimination. Kraut (history, American U.) found that new immigrant populations--made up of impoverished laborers living in urban America's least sanitary conditions--have been victims of illness rather than its progenitors, yet the medical establishment has often blamed epidemics on immigrants' traditions, ethnic habits, or genetic heritage. Originally published in hardcover by Basic Books in 1994. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Immigration and health care are hotly debated and contentious issues. Policies that relate to both issues—to the health of newcomers—often reflect misimpressions about immigrants, and their impact on health care systems. Despite the fact that immigrants are typically younger and healthier than natives, and that many immigrants play a vital role as care-givers in their new lands, native citizens are often reluctant to extend basic health care to immigrants, choosing instead to let them suffer, to let them die prematurely, or to expedite their return to their home lands. Likewise, many nations turn against immigrants when epidemics such as Ebola strike, under the false belief that native populations can be kept well only if immigrants are kept out. In The Health of Newcomers, Patricia Illingworth and Wendy E. Parmet demonstrate how shortsighted and dangerous it is to craft health policy on the basis of ethnocentrism and xenophobia. Because health is a global public good and people benefit from the health of neighbor and stranger alike, it is in everyone’s interest to ensure the health of all. Drawing on rigorous legal and ethical arguments and empirical studies, as well as deeply personal stories of immigrant struggles, Illingworth and Parmet make the compelling case that global phenomena such as poverty, the medical brain drain, organ tourism, and climate change ought to inform the health policy we craft for newcomers and natives alike.