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US legislation that protects some immigrants from deportation has been good for the mental health of their children. But the programme is under threat, with president Donald Trump expected to announce whether he will scrap it next week.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme was introduced by president Barack Obama in 2012. It provides undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the US before 2007 as children with work permits and protection from deportation.
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To investigate how immigration status can affect a person’s family, Jens Hainmueller at Stanford University and his colleagues have been using data from Oregon’s Emergency Medicaid programme, a healthcare scheme predominantly used by undocumented immigrants.
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The researchers analysed data linked to more than 5600 mothers who used Emergency Medicaid between 2003 and 2015, splitting them into two groups – those whose birthdates made them eligible for DACA protections, and those born just before the June 1981 cut-off. They then analysed mental health diagnoses across the women’s 8610 children, who are all US citizens by birth.
Dramatic drop
The team found that 7.8 per cent of children whose mothers were not eligible for DACA were diagnosed during the study period with adjustment or anxiety disorders – mental health issues often affected by external stresses, such as the threat of a parent being deported.
But only 3.3 per cent of children with mothers eligible for DACA protections were diagnosed with the same disorders.
“The fact that it reduced by over 50 per cent is really astonishing,” says Sarah Lowe at Montclair State University in New Jersey. “It shows that this policy can have huge impacts on the life of an entire family.”
Hainmueller says that his team was surprised by the large drop in diagnoses. “I think this is the clearest causal evidence we have that this undocumented status of the parents can really be a significant barrier to the normal development of the children,” he says.
The team is now doing similar analyses with data from other states, including California and New York. But DACA’s days may be numbered. Trump was critical of the programme during his election campaign last year, and has until 5 September to decide whether he will dissolve it.
Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aan5893
Read more: The truth about migration
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