Sachin
This is such an important and urgent question. I really wish there was more rigorous research on how deportation policies affected the health of people directly targeted for deportation, their families, and communities. Developing a rigorous research design to evaluate this is very difficult though. First, you must be very specific about the policy you plan to evaluate. Major federal initiatives like DACA? Local enforcement initiatives? It is very useful to start with being clear about the policy, because policies that seem similar may actually have important differences in consequences, and if your evaluation does not tie to something very specific, policy makers may not necessarily know how to act on it.
But the biggest challenge is distinguishing the effects of things that make people vulnerable to deportation from the policy effects per se. Comparing the health of people whose family members are deported to the health of people whose family member are not deported will not be rigorous enough, because such families probably differ in many other ways that influence health (e.g., they have different amounts of income, education, wealth, social ties, occupational opportunities...). So it's hard to show evidence that it is the deportation policy itself that is influential. WE will discuss in class more ideas about how to evaluate the health effects of such policies.
Maria