Identify a policy that is not usually intended to be a health policy but that you think may have important health implications.
Many policies may indirectly or directly affect the health of communities. Fort he purpose in answer this question I thought I should talk about anti-immigrant laws and explore more on how it may affect the health of immigrant communities. The Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) replaced the program established in 2008 called Secure Communities. This enforcement was placed at the state and local level and it allows the police to submit fingerprints of individuals that were arrested for a criminal violation to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) so that they can be deported.
•Describe why an evaluation of that policy is informative (primarily about the policy, or primarily a test of hypothesized mediators?)
•Specify the outcomes and populations you think most affected or least affected by the policy.
•Propose a study design to evaluate the policy
–Describe biggest challenge to implementing and drawing inferences about the impact of the policy on health
I think that PEP may contribute to mediators that affect the health of immigrant individuals and people who have ties with immigrant communities. For example, PEP relies on racial profiling since cops get to decide who they should send fingerprints to ICE. There are many immigrants from all over the world with different skin colors and racial profiles. However in the US, the typical stereotype image of an immigrant is a Latino/a with brown skin color. This means that people who look Latino/a are at risk of being racial profiled and being deported. PEP does not specify what they mean by “criminal violation” and what it should consist of; however, this can bring several consequences to the target population. A criminal violation can be as small as being stop by the police while driving without your driver’s license at hand- which for many immigrants who are undocumented do not have. In addition, cases as simple as calling the police for help can be detrimental if you are undocumented. For example, Pedro Figueroa went to the police to file a report for his stolen car, when federal immigrant officials then detained him. Now he is detained away from his family and waiting for deportation. When I watched the news, Pedro’s whole family looked distressed and devastated; the youngest girl was crying screaming for his dad to come back. Cases like Pedro’s affect the overall wellbeing of immigrant families because it brings fear and leaves the community vulnerable to exploitation and injustices. Immigrant communities would be less likely to report maltreatment, violence, exploitation at their work, or even to call the police for help for fear of being deported.
I think a study to evaluate the policy and its impact on health would be hard to do. However, we could looked at Latino/a immigrant families from the bay area that have been affected by PEP and non-Latino/a immigrant families that haven’t been affected. We could measure both group’s perceived stress level before and after incidents where PEP was involved, using the Cohen perceived stress scale and correlate that with a stress biomarkers such as cortisol. We can also look at BMI, weight, and glycated hemoglobin for prevalence of obesity and diabetes in these communities. I think the biggest challenge would be to single out the direct effect of PEP on health because there are other social factors that influence the health of immigrant communities. But this study may be a start to something good.