The bodily scars of legal violence: local immigration enforcement, state immigrant policy, and health inequality

Abstract Over the past three decades in the United States, a surge of federal, state, and local laws and policies has increased levels of immigration enforcement and eroded immigrant access to public services and benefits. While a large body of research documents the deleterious effects of these forms of legal violence for a range of immigrant outcomes like poverty, employment, and schooling, the health consequences of these sociopolitical shifts for aging adults remain to be better understood. Linking panel data from the Health and Retirement Study (2004–2016) (n = 18,259) to longitudinal data on county immigration enforcement and state immigrant policies, we estimate three-way fixed-effects models to examine how changes in immigration enforcement and policy shape physical and physiological health at the intersection of race-ethnicity and immigration status. Results show that as local immigration enforcement intensifies and state policy contexts become more hostile toward immigrants, foreign-born adults—especially Latinx immigrants—experience accelerated health decline. Like episodes of physical violence that can leave lacerations and damage—both visible and more concealed—our results provide evidence of the health harms of state-sanctioned violence: what we call bodily scars of legal violence. Taken together, this research shows how policies governing the surveillance and control of immigrants not only shape structures of racial domination and immigrant exclusion but the embodied health inequities that flow from them, with implications for understanding and redressing inequities in health and aging.