Employer Verification Mandates and Infant Health
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Employer Verification Mandates and Infant Health Kate W. Strully1 · Robert Bozick2 · Ying Huang3 · Lane F. Burgette2 Received: 17 January 2019 / Accepted: 8 August 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract In recent decades, several states have enacted their own immigration enforcement policies. This reflects substantial variation in the social environments faced by immigrants and native-born citizens, and has raised concerns about unintended consequences. E-Verify mandates, which require employers to use an electronic system to ascertain legal status as a pre-requisite for employment, are a common example of this trend. Drawing on birth certificate data from 2007 to 2014, during which 21 states enacted E-Verify mandates, we find that these mandates are associated with a decline in birthweight and gestational age for infants born to immigrant mothers with demographic profiles matching the undocumented population in their state as well as for infants of native-born mothers. In observing negative trends for both immigrants and natives, our findings do not support the hypothesis that E-Verify has a distinct impact on immigrant health; however, the broader economic, political, and demographic contexts that coincide with these policies, which likely impact the broader community of both immigrants and natives, may pose risks to infant health. Keywords Infant health · Immigration enforcement · United States A constellation of economic, political, and demographic factors have created an unprecedented amount of geographic variation in how immigrants and their receiving communities interact with one another in the U.S. Driven in large part by shifting labor demands, immigrants over recent decades have increasingly settled in “new destinations” throughout the mid-West and South, rather than the traditional “gateways” (e.g., California, Texas, New York, and Illinois) that had previously been home to most immigrants. This trend has resulted in sometimes striking demographic and social change as communities that were predominantly white and native-born have * Kate W. Strully [email protected] 1
University at Albany, SUNY, 1400 Washington Ave, AS 308, Albany, NY 12222, USA
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RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, USA
3
University of Texas at San Antonio, 501 W. César E. Chávez Blvd., San Antonio, TX 78207, USA
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become increasingly diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, and nativity (Lichter 2012; Massey and Capoferro 2008). While federal legislators have remained at an impasse on immigration reform, states and localities have responded to their changing communities with a flurry of legislative action. At one extreme are state and local lawmakers, often from “new destination” locations, who argue that the federal government has not done enough to regulate immigration, and have taken it on themselves to pass restrictive immigration-related bills designed to increase deportations and cut undocumented immigrants off from jobs and public services. At the other extreme are localities
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