This webinar was recorded on Nov. 29, 2023.
Immigrants, who represent 14% of the U.S. population, aren’t inherently less healthy than their native-born counterparts. But research shows their health declines the longer they live in this country.
One of the major reasons is that there are barriers to accessing care, partly due to a lack of English language proficiency and health insurance. Noncitizen immigrants tend to work in low-wage jobs that don’t offer that benefit.
In this webinar, Margarita Martín-Hidalgo Birnbaum, AHCJ’s health beat leader for health equity, spoke with KERA Immigration Reporter Stella M. Chávez, Rural Women’s Health Project Social Service Manager Adriana Menéndez, and KFF Director of Immigrant Health Policy Dristi Pillai, Ph.D., about immigrant health and ethical issues that journalists should be aware of when covering the topic. For instance, foreign-born people from the same country may have different socioeconomic backgrounds and legal immigration statuses. Reporters who interview undocumented immigrants need to be conscientious about the legal consequences that their sources may face if they use their names or images in stories.
Margarita Martín-Hidalgo Birnbaum is AHCJ’s health beat leader for health equity and an independent journalist based in Dallas. Over the years, her stories about health, as well as crime and other topics she covered early in her career, have appeared in WebMD, American Heart Association News, The Dallas Morning News, The Miami Herald and Reuters. Fluent in English and Spanish, Birnbaum is also an interpreter and translator. Her personal and professional experiences living and working in the U.S. and in several Central American countries have informed her reporting work in covering health disparity trends among racial and ethnic groups in the U.S.
Stella M. Chávez covers immigration for KERA, the NPR member station in Dallas. In 2019, she broke a national story about a large-scale immigration raid on a technology repair company in Allen, Texas. She also reported on the Uvalde school shooting and the mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart. Previously, she covered education and produced several multi-part projects, including “Generation One” about immigrant students in North Texas and The Race to Save Failing Schools about schools trying to meet state academic standards.
Before joining public radio, Chávez spent nearly 13 years as a daily newspaper reporter for The Dallas Morning News, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and The Ledger in Lakeland, Fla.
She’s received several national and state awards, including a 2021 Investigative Reporters & Editors award for the collaborative series: “Hot Days: Heat’s Mounting Death Toll on Workers in the U.S.” In 2007, she received the Livingston Award for Young Journalists in national reporting for “Yolanda’s Crossing,” a seven-part series that reconstructs the journey of a young sexual abuse victim from a village in Oaxaca, Mexico, to Dallas.
Adriana Menéndez is the social services manager at the Rural Women’s Health Project in Gainesville, Fla. In that capacity, she manages the day-to-day operations of Project Salud, a referral line catering to the needs of the Spanish-speaking community. She has collaborated with health care providers, legal experts, and social service agencies to expand the network of available resources for callers. Menéndez is an advocate for language access for minorities, emphasizing the importance of inclusivity and cultural sensitivity in service delivery.
Drishti Pillai, Ph.D., is the director of immigrant health policy at KFF. In that capacity, she oversees data and policy analysis about health care access trends and issues in that population, with a focus on health equity.
Before joining KFF, Dr. Pillai was the research director at the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum and a faculty member at George Washington University, where her research focused on public charge rules, population differences in access to maternal and child health services, and access to government programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Dr. Pillai holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from The Ohio State University, a Master of Public Health degree from Emory University and a Ph.D. in public policy from George Washington University.
The analyses that Dr. Pillai has published at KFF include:
