@article{8f83db21ea024c16b65f0e0803cf2dab,
title = "Protecting unauthorized immigrant mothers improves their children's mental health",
abstract = "The United States is embroiled in a debate about whether to protect or deport its estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants, but the fact that these immigrants are also parents to more than 4 million U.S.-born children is often overlooked. We provide causal evidence of the impact of parents' unauthorized immigration status on the health of their U.S. citizen children. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program granted temporary protection from deportation to more than 780,000 unauthorized immigrants. We used Medicaid claims data from Oregon and exploited the quasi-random assignment of DACA eligibility among mothers with birthdates close to the DACA age qualification cutoff. Mothers' DACA eligibility significantly decreased adjustment and anxiety disorder diagnoses among their children. Parents' unauthorized status is thus a substantial barrier to normal child development and perpetuates health inequalities through the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage.",
author = "Jens Hainmueller and Duncan Lawrence and Linna Mart{\'e}n and Bernard Black and Lucila Figueroa and Michael Hotard and Jim{\'e}nez, {Tom{\'a}s R.} and Fernando Mendoza and Rodriguez, {Maria I.} and Swartz, {Jonas J.} and Laitin, {David D.}",
note = "Funding Information: This research was funded by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation (grant no. 93-16-12). We also acknowledge funding from the Ford Foundation for operational support of the Stanford Immigration Policy Lab. For helpful advice, we thank K. Bansak, V. G. Carrion, A. Hainmueller, and J. Wang. Replication code is available through Harvard Dataverse (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi: 10.7910/DVN/8EEDAP). A preregistered analysis plan is available at the Evidence and Governance in Politics website under study ID 20170227AC (http://egap.org/design-registrations). The analysis plan is also reprinted in the supplementary materials. The Institutional Review Boards at Stanford University (protocol 40907) and Oregon Health & Science University (protocol 15633) approved this research.",
year = "2017",
month = sep,
day = "8",
doi = "10.1126/science.aan5893",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "357",
pages = "1041--1044",
journal = "Science",
issn = "0036-8075",
publisher = "American Association for the Advancement of Science",
number = "6355",
}