UCLA

Immigration is a debated topic in the US and the high-income world. One consequence of widespread negative perceptions of immigrants are legal crackdowns on immigrants themselves, which can lead to incarceration and occupational exclusion, and can affect already excluded racial groups (such as Black individuals). This dissertation is a collection of three essays that attempts to disentangle the assumptions behind these interventions as well as their consequences on marginalized persons.

The first paper posits immigration enforcement within the larger context of mass incarceration in the United States, which has provided employment to rural distressed communities, leading them to compete for immigration and criminal justice prisons. The paper looks at the beginning of the COVID pandemic (2020-2022) to determine whether there were negative externalities to rural hospitals adjacent to carceral facilities, in the form of strained hospital units or worsened operating margins. It finds that rural hospitals geographically adjacent to carceral institutions in minority-majority communities have an 31% increased probability of having completely full ICUs, with no impact in majority-majority communities and no operating margins difference with controls.

The second paper examines the relationship between GDP and physician emigration, using the framework of the mobility transition, which would predict a monotonous decline in emigration with origin country GDP for highly educated professionals like physicians. Using OECD physician entry data from 2000-2019 it is found that the relationship between GDP per capita is heterogenous by geographic region, with a negative relationship in most regions except for sub-Saharan Africa (where there is no relationship), the Middle East and North Africa (where the relationship might be quadratic) & European countries outside the European Union (where the relationship is positive).

The third paper looks at the intersection of racism and legal exclusion through the lens of Black undocumented immigrants. Using 1999-2018 National Health Interview Survey data, the paper examines how 1) among Black individuals, immigrant status correlate and 2) among undocumented immigrants, race and ethnicity correlate to 5 measures: health insurance coverage, physician utilization, hospitalizations, mental distress, and sleep. Results show that legal status, race, and ethnicity are all important measures of healthcare access and mental health.