Health

Obama Helped Make Latinx Americans Less Depressed

Today in evidence that progressive policies are good for our mental health: A new study found that undocumented Latinx people eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program had lower levels of depression compared to their peers.

The DACA program provides temporary, renewable work visas for undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children; DACA enrollees are often referred to as “Dreamers.” The program has seen more than 750,000 people enroll since President Obama signed it into law via executive order in August 2012. President Trump said during his campaign that he’d reverse all of Obama’s executive orders as well as immediately terminate Dreamers’ protections from deportation, but he seems to have softened since. Last month, he said “We’re gonna show great heart” for Dreamers—but then one woman was almost deported. So we don’t really know where he stands or what will happen, which is sadly now par for the course.

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A research team from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Massachusetts General Hospital wanted to examine the health effects of DACA, so for a study published in The Lancet Public Health, they looked at responses to the US National Health Interview Survey from more than 14,000 Latinx non-citizens from 2008 to 2015. The researchers used respondents’ age, time of immigration, and other criteria to figure out which people were potentially eligible for DACA and which people were definitely not. (The survey didn’t ask about immigration status).

Next, they compared changes in respondents’ overall health and depression symptoms—both self-reported—before and after the 2012 program went into effect. They found that the potential Dreamers were 50 percent less likely to report symptoms consistent with depression than people not eligible for DACA.

While the authors didn’t know who had enrolled in DACA, they think the analysis likely understates the effects of the program—they looked at people who were potentially eligible, and the number of enrollees is likely smaller, so the reduction in depression levels among those actually enrolled could be even bigger than what they found. Lead researcher Atheendar Venkataramani of the MGH Division of General Medicine noted in a release that it’s possible mental health benefits would be much larger for people directly affected by the policy.

“It is well known that economic circumstances affect mental health,” Venkataramani said. “The DACA program increased access to the US labor market for these individuals and raised hopes for a better economic future. The large mental health benefits we found likely reflect these positive changes.”

Co-author Ichiro Kawachi, an epidemiologist at the Harvard Chan School, added: “Policymakers have traditionally not taken health impacts into account when debating immigration. While our results are specific to the DACA program, we hope they may better inform decisions around immigration policy more generally.”

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