Immigration Status as a Health Care Barrier in the USA during COVID-19
“COVID-19 has influenced migrant experiences in a variety of ways, including the government’s use of public health orders to prevent migration into the country and the risk of immigrants contracting COVID-19 while in detention centers,” begins our peer-reviewed article entitled “Immigration Status as a Health Care Barrier in the USA during COVID-19,” published online in March 2021 in the Journal of Migration and Health, by Jessica Hill, Darlene Xiomara Rodriguez, and Paul N. McDaniel, each at Kennesaw State University in metro Atlanta, Georgia.
As the abstract of our article continues, “this paper focuses on barriers that immigrants of diverse statuses living in the U.S.-along with their families-may face in accessing health services during the pandemic, as well as implications of these barriers for COVID-19 prevention and response efforts. We report findings from a scoping review about immigration status as a social determinant of health and discuss ways that immigration status can impede access to health care across levels of the social ecology. We then develop a conceptual outline to explore how changes to federal immigration policies and COVID-19 federal relief efforts implemented in 2020 may have created additional barriers to health care for immigrants and their families. Improving health care access for immigrant populations in the U.S. requires interventions at all levels of the social ecology and across various social determinants of health, both in response to COVID-19 and to strengthen health systems more broadly.”
Continue reading the full article here from Journal of Migration and Health.
Originally published at https://www.sciencedirect.com on March 20, 2021.
