A Conceptual Framework to Understand Latino Immigrants' Well Being: An Introduction to the Issue

Abstract

Understanding the well being of Latino immigrants in a neighborhood close to the nation capital is relevant to public policy. This issue provides a rationale for problematizing well-being and offers a conceptual framework informed by political economy. It reflects upon health and social care together with other basic social needs, such as education and income. Moreover, authors argue that experiential methods and a life course perspective are useful for our purposes. In the papers, summarized below, the methodological emphasis is twofold. Articles are based on a combination of qualitative methods that include interviews and participant observation.The State of Maryland is rapidly changing its demographic profile with an unprecedented influx of immigrants from all over the world. The foreign-born in Maryland have increased by 65% during the last decade and 34% of those were born in Latin America. In fact, Maryland is growing faster than most traditional immigrant gateway states, including New York, Florida and California.2 Yet, despite these shifts, there is surprising little attention being paid by either researchers or policy makers to this changing population. The foreign-born are either understudied, or blended in large survey-type studies which are unable to capture the most invisible segments of this population, particularly the undocumented. Unwittingly, researchers beholden to these methods ultimately minimize the importance of issues vital to the role of public policy on the political incorporation of immigrants. In the analysis, authors are cognizant of how individual immigrants' lives are affected by a larger social context whereby inter-ethnic relations, the structure of the local labor market access to housing and health care can have enormous consequences for their long-term wellbeing. Immigrants are not passive in this process and construct their own strategies from the margins.If researchers up to now have largely been remiss in paying sufficient attention to the new immigration to the Washington Metropolitan area, the policy community has tended to focus primarily on the real or imagined social problems posed by newly arrived immigrants. Policy makers both inform and fuel the media's political construction of newcomers as takers of finite resources rather than contributors. Armed with a zero-sum logic, the inevitable conclusion is that immigrants are undeserving of public programs, usurpers of jobs that are intended for native workers, and placing pressure on insufficient housing. Rarely are these opinions balanced with well-designed studies that show the positive impacts of immigration in our localities, such as the fact that immigrants often take jobs that native-born persons have generally shun, that services are inadequately funded despite the surge in immigration, and that, currently, some sectors of the economy (construction, food services, cleaning) depend heavily on immigrant labor. By placing the individual immigrant in a social context, this issue intends to contribute to a more balanced assessment of immigrants' contributions to the local community as well as the barriers to socio-economic adaptation they confront.Our research methods have given prominence to the voices of immigrants and the seldom-understood historical and geopolitical context where they are encapsulated. The focus is on the experience of immigrants living in the Washington DC metropolitan area. Important to this conversation about Maryland are the older residents and the changes they have had to make in order to accommodate to a rapid influx of immigrants from many countries, with varied socio-economic backgrounds, and who settle along concentrated as well as dispersed residential patterns.Conceptual Framework to Understand Latino Immigrants' Well-BeingAt this juncture, I will expand on each of the relevant factors within our conceptual framework. The first variable examined is demographic: we focus on Latinos or HispanicsThe Latino population in the United States grew by 53% between 1980 and 1990. …