Immigrant health: What keeps people healthy or wears them down?
Arlene Geronimus, a scholar at the University of Michigan, coined the word “weathering” to describe how discrimination can literally wear people down, causing premature aging among African Americans. It shortens lives, she argues, and creates the underlying conditions for ill health and chronic disease.
Similarly, the refugee experience -- trauma, war and genocide -- erodes the health of those who settle here. Stresses multiply when refugees must contend with the wounds of the past along with the complexities of life in America. Fear also exacts a heavy price -- degrading the everyday lives of those in America illegally.
Six news outlets across America have joined together as the Reporting on Health Collaborative to address such questions. All the reporters in the project, an initiative of our USC Annenberg program, participated in either our National or California Health Journalism Fellowship. Each came to our intensive training institute with the idea of bringing to light key aspects of the immigrant health experience.
We think it’s no coincidence that reporters and editors around the country felt a common sense of urgency around these stories. We asked them to join forces to help connect the dots and to help others in policy and community circles to see the connections too.
Our bilingual Living in the Shadows series explores when health care systems meet the need of the country’s growing immigrant population and when they fail them. We look at how tradition and culture play a role in health outcomes. Other stories shed light on how detention and deportation affect the health of the families caught in authorities’ net. The health of immigrants has been shown to deteriorate over time. Does disadvantage make them sick? Or, are some immigrants less healthy than they seem when they first arrive? And what are the implications of these questions given that Obamacare excludes undocumented immigrants from the health reform effort sweeping the nation
These aren’t academic questions. Two thirds of America’s population growth between 1995 and 2050 stems from immigration, one recent study found. The health of immigrants increasingly will define the health of America.