Primary Submission Category: Policy
Immigration Policy Climates and Birth Outcomes among Muslim immigrants in the United States
Authors: Nafeesa Andrabi, Goleen Samari,
Presenting Author: Nafeesa Andrabi*
Structural drivers of health inequities, including xenophobic and racist policies at the US state level, have the potential to affect many minoritized groups. Aggregate indices have been developed to examine state migration policy environments and health, yet these indices are rarely used to consider outcomes over time, by nativity, or by race/ethnicity. Muslim immigrants are a rapidly growing US population and face increasingly hostile conditions domestically and globally. They are exposed to structural- and individual-level racism, discrimination, and xenophobia, yet the health outcomes of Muslim immigrants in the US are understudied. This is in part because official data sources do not collect information on religion and Muslims do not neatly fit into institutionalized ethnoracial categories (i.e., Black or Hispanic) that drive most demographic research focusing on health disparities. Muslim immigrants intersect multiple categories of otherness (nativity, religion, and race) that may pattern their exposure to immigration policy-related stress and increase their susceptibility to poorer health outcomes than other population subgroups.
Linking data from the Immigration Policy Climate Index (IPC) that aggregates inclusionary and exclusionary state immigration policies to U.S. natality data and a novel methodological approach to identify immigrant Muslim mothers, we examine the relationship between state policy environments and birth outcomes from 2009 to 2022. We find that exclusionary state-level immigration policy contexts are associated with a higher risk of preterm birth and low-birth weight for South Asian Muslim immigrant mothers (i.e. from Pakistan and Bangladesh) but not for Middle Eastern/North African (i.e. from Syria or Egypt) or African Muslim immigrant mothers (i.e. from Somalia). The results highlight important differences in how racialized religion and race/ethnicity intersect to shape experiences with policy climates and contribute to birth outcome disparities.