“Their Needs Are Higher Than What I Can Do”: Providers' Experiences of Working with Latino Immigrant Families

Background and Purpose: Given the growth of the Latino population in the U.S., much has been written about the needs and issues affecting Latino immigrant families including discrimination and the effects of immigration enforcement. Increasingly, social workers have been called upon to provide linguistically and culturally competent services in their work with Latino clients. Little attention has been paid, however, toward understanding the experiences of providers who are tasked with alleviating the problems of marginalized and vulnerable populations, which often leads to provider burnout, turnover, and compromised quality of services. Guided by the framework of equity and social justice, the purpose of this paper is to answer the following research question: What are the experiences, challenges, and recommendations of social service providers working with Latino immigrant families?

Methods: The data presented draw from individual qualitative interviews conducted with 17 social service providers who work with Latino immigrants in a large city in the southern U.S. Providers were recruited through purposive and respondent-driven sampling techniques. Most providers were women (76%) and White (53%, Latino/a 35%, and Other 12%). Participants represented a variety of helping professionals, including social workers, mental health counselors, and youth workers. Interviews were audiotaped, transcribed and double-coded. An inductive thematic approach was utilized for analysis.

Results: Providers who worked with Latino immigrant families continuously described the ways in which systems and institutions failed their clients, including poverty, lack of affordable housing, separation of families through deportation, lack of quality education, and inaccessible healthcare services. Providers’ narratives portrayed immense dissatisfaction with the system and helplessness in their inability to make substantial changes in their clients’ lives given the countless structural barriers. Working in such context took an emotional toll on the providers in form of frustration, disempowerment, and doubts in the effectiveness of their work. Although they genuinely wanted to help their clients, many providers expressed lacking skills to work toward changing the circumstances of their clients’ lives, and they predominantly offered individual-level solutions, such as counseling services and parenting classes. Few providers called for advocacy and community development efforts to improve the quality of life and mental health outcomes of Latino families. These results did not differ based on the provider’s ethnicity.     

Conclusions and Implications: Our findings suggest a need to raise critical consciousness among future service providers about the tension they will experience in practice as a result of the limitations of the social service delivery model in addressing the many structural barriers Latino immigrant families—and other marginalized groups—face. Moreover, helping professions need to go beyond the recommendations for self-care and mindfulness to prevent provider burnout and turnover and to address the inherent paradoxes in service provision to oppressed and vulnerable groups. We conclude with a discussion of the needed shift in social work toward a social action model to show an authentic commitment to equity and social justice and to empower both providers and the marginalized populations they serve.