Immigration Status and Children’s Mental Health

Julia Gelatt, Princeton University

Five million children in the United States have at least one undocumented immigrant parent, but very little research explores the ways in which being undocumented or having undocumented parents affects children’s health and well-being. I examine the relationship between parents’ and children’s immigration status and children’s mental health in Latino families, utilizing a dataset with precise measures of immigrants' legal status. I investigate whether the mental health advantage attributed to immigrant children and children of immigrants in prior research extends to those with undocumented immigrant parents. I find that mental health, measured as externalizing, internalizing, and overall behavioral problems, is worse among children of immigrants than among similar children of natives and that undocumented immigrant children have greater externalizing problems than US-born or legal immigrant children. I further explore household and neighborhood characteristics associated with children of immigrants' mental health.