Low birth weights, high stress levels among immigrant population in the US
By
Genevieve Leigh
17 July 2017
The anti-immigrant policies of the US government, vastly escalated by the Trump administration, have created widespread fear and panic in the thousands of immigrant communities throughout the country.
The scenes of Rómulo Avelica-González being apprehended with his 13-year-old daughter looking on, or Guadalupe García de Rayos behind the bars of an armored Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicle with her family and friends trying to stop it from leaving, are no doubt seared in the minds of millions of immigrants as examples of what might happen if some unfortunate event lands them in the hands of their local ICE agents.
The effect on immigrants’ health, as well as the health of their children and even their unborn children, is documented in several recent studies.
The first, released in January of this year, uses Postville, Iowa as a case study.
In 2008, under the Bush administration, the small Iowa town of Postville was the scene of the largest single workplace immigration raid in US history up to that point. Early one morning in May, ICE agents raided the town’s slaughterhouse and meat packing plant, arresting close to 400 immigrants. The immigrants were charged with various “crimes” that come with having false identity papers: identity theft, document fraud, and the use of stolen social security numbers. Well over half of the workers were found guilty within just four days. They were tried in court hearings five at a time, served a five-month prison sentence, and were finally deported.
Researchers at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor compared birth certificates of 52,000 children born before and after the raid. The comparison revealed…