CLAS Lecture Series: Anti-Immigration Law and Birth Outcomes: The Case of Arizona's SB1070

Anti-Immigration Law and Birth Outcomes: The Case of Arizona's SB1070 with Florencia Torche

Research has examined the consequences of anti-undocumented immigration policy for migrants and their families, but there is little acknowledgement that the effects of these policies could extend to those experiencing them before birth. During this lecture, Florencia Torche, Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, examines the effect of Arizona’s 2010 Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, arguably the broadest and harshest anti-undocumented immigration measure in the recent past, on the birth outcomes of immigrant Hispanic women exposed to the law during pregnancy. Using birth records and linear and non-linear difference-in-difference models, Torche's research finds that exposure to the law resulted in lower birth weight and reduced gestational age among immigrant Hispanic women, but not among US-born Black, White, or Hispanic women. Tests of compositional change and selectivity of the population exposed suggest that the Hispanic immigrant mothers exposed to SB1070 were positively selected, so the measured adverse effect of the law may be a lower bound. The findings indicate that prenatal exposure to institutional contexts shapes the outcomes of disadvantaged populations, influencing health disparities and the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage. Florencia Torche's scholarship examines inequality and mobility in several national contexts including the United States and Latin American countries.