Services Not Key for Latinas in U.S. Illegally, Study Shows

Four of five illegal immigrant Latinas in Orange County see themselves as part of their community and nearly two-thirds hope to remain in the United States, but they don’t consider taxpayer-subsidized social services a lure to stay, a UC Irvine study has found.

The study, derived from telephone interviews with 160 randomly selected undocumented Latinas in the county, also found that--despite low incomes and the presence of young children--their use of public assistance and preventive health services was low.

Most of the findings in the study contradict the fierce arguments of illegal immigration foes, who have pushed in recent years to cut access for undocumented immigrants to public health and welfare services.

“The political rhetoric has focused on the negative, that undocumented immigrants have come to abuse our system and if we stop them from using social services, they’ll go back,” said Leo Chavez, a UC Irvine anthropology professor who helped lead the study team.

“We’re saying those assumptions are off. These are people who are basically working class, don’t seem to be using exorbitant levels of health care. And they embrace life here, they feel comfortable here. They have an investment here in terms of their jobs and kids,” Chavez said.

But foes attacked the study, suggesting it overlooks basic realities.

“This looks to me to be a complete whitewash of illegal immigration,” said Harold Ezell, a former federal immigration official and one of the leading proponents of Proposition 187, the watershed anti-illegal immigration measure approved by voters in 1994. “He’s obviously never been to any of the emergency rooms in Orange County to see who’s using them--it’s non-English-speaking young people with babies.”

Ezell added that if illegal immigrants “really want to feel part of the community, they ought to learn to speak English.”

Several academicians said the UC Irvine report, despite the pitfalls of conducting sensitive sociological research over the telephone, at the very least echoes the findings of previous studies on illegal immigrants elsewhere in California.

“This is a very meritorious effort to try to get information from a sample of women who are at the heart of a lot of the controversies that have been bubbling over in Southern California for a long time, since well before the passage of Proposition 187,” said Ruben Rumbaut, a sociology professor at Michigan State University and author of “Immigrant America: A Portrait.”

The findings were culled from a larger, three-year study of 803 Latinas in Orange County--undocumented, legal immigrants and Latina citizens--being conducted by Chavez and three other researchers for the American Cancer Institute. A control group of 422 white women were also interviewed for the project, which is focused on cancer screening and treatment.

As an offshoot of the bigger project, Chavez said, “these were sort of incidental findings. We didn’t have an ax to grind or enter into a political debate when we did our research. I think it gives our findings more credibility.”

He also said the study marks one of the first research efforts on illegal immigrants that uses randomly selected subjects. Because illegal immigrants often linger in the shadows of society, it is difficult to reach a broad population.

But in Orange County, 94% of all Latinos have telephones, allowing researchers here to make contact more easily. Most other studies have relied on data from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the U.S. Census Bureau or interviews with people befriended in the field.

The study, which is slated for publication in the International Migration Review, provides a telling statistical snapshot of undocumented Latinas in Orange County.

It found that undocumented Latinas represent 3.7% of women 18 and older in the county, where 23% of all people are Latino. These undocumented Latinas have been in the country four years on average, compared with about a dozen years for documented Latinas.

The median age of undocumented Latinas is 27, compared with 33 for legal immigrants. The average undocumented Latina had two children, and a quarter of them lived in households with two or more married couples sharing the same roof.

Less than a quarter of them were employed full time, compared with 40% for documented Latinas and more than 50% for Latina citizens. Of those who worked, 58% held service jobs, predominantly housecleaning and child care.

But very few, the study found, had jumped into the welfare safety net. Only 3% of the undocumented Latinas in the study said they were receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children for their U.S.-born children, the same percentage as for documented and citizen Latinas.

Only 21% had private medical insurance coverage, compared with 52% of the documented and 77% of Latina citizens. The figure for white women was 86%. Even so, just 18% of the undocumented Latinas said they turned to government-sponsored medical programs, the study found.

Although illegal immigrants have been characterized in heated public policy debates as sojourners eager to reap the wealth of the United States and then return home, the study found otherwise.

It concluded that 84% of the undocumented Latinas said they felt part of a community in the United States and more than 63% said they wanted to remain and not return home.

The longer they have been here, the stronger their desire to stay. Of those who have lived here longer than five years, 79% said they wanted to stay. Only about half of those living here five years or less desire to remain.

There also was a north-south bias. Latinas in the northern part of Orange County, which has long-established Spanish-speaking enclaves in Santa Ana and surrounding cities, are more likely to feel a community spirit than those in the upscale South County, the study found.

A sense of community figured strongly in the reasoning of undocumented Latinas hoping to stay in the country. Those ensconced in their community were 10 times as likely as those without such sentiments to express a desire to stay in the United States, the study determined.

Those here longer than five years were three times as likely to stay.

But, somewhat surprisingly, those with a regular source of health care were 65% less likely than those without it to intend to stay, a finding Chavez said might reflect a dissatisfaction with the quality of care, language difficulties and uncovered costs that prove a financial frustration.

The study concludes that undocumented Latina immigrants are lured across the border not by social services but rather because of work, family and community.

“If we shut off health care, if we shut off the schools, the jobs are still going to be here and they aren’t going to make a mass migration home,” Chavez said. “We need to discuss what kind of society we’re creating under that scenario.”

Rumbaut agreed, saying that “the moral of the story is we reap what we sow. When you welcome people to a community, you encourage them to feel that they matter, and that they have a stake here. But if you sow hate, you’ll reap the products of hate. If you sow exclusion, you can’t expect the constructive investments that people who feel they’re part of the whole are going to make.”

Wayne Cornelius, research director at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego, cautioned that the study reflects only the urban-dwelling immigrant and not those who dwell in rural areas, such as migrant farm workers. But, he said, it still underscores a broad body of prior research showing that most illegal immigrants feel grounded in the United States.

“Politicians like to view this as a population that isn’t rooted, one that can be induced to self-deport simply by denying access to social services,” Cornelius said. “Study after study has shown that the proportion of undocumented immigrants expressing a desire to stay in the U.S. is high.”

He also said that the findings on health care are important. With a population that intends to stick around, the lack of preventive screening for cancer and other illnesses “is worrisome,” Cornelius said. “We should be spending more on this population for certain kinds of preventive care, if the object is to reduce long-term outlays.”