Understanding County-Level Relationships between Foreign-Born Populations, Latino Populations, and Child Outcomes in the United States, 2015-2018

Background/Purpose:

Evidence continues to show favorable health outcomes of foreign-born and Latino populations, notwithstanding their low socioeconomic positions in the U.S. The most common explanation for this epidemiological paradox is the sociocultural perspective, which claims cultural protective factors among these populations such as healthy family dynamics and strong social supports. Despite the rapid increase of foreign-born and Latino populations in the U.S., we have not fully understood the associations between foreign-born and Latino populations, and community child outcomes. To address this knowledge gap, this study aimed to examine how the percentage of foreign-born residents and the percentage of Latino residents were associated with child maltreatment report rates and child disability rates at the county level in the U.S. This study provided estimates overall and within racial/ethnic groups from 2015–2018 and further assessed any changes of these associations over time.

Methods:

This study used U.S. national county-level data linking multiple administrative/archival databases from 2015–2018 to examine the relationships between two independent variables (i.e., % foreign-born and % Latino) and two types of child outcomes (i.e., child maltreatment report rates and child disability rates), while controlling for a range of relevant confounders (i.e., % Black, % child, % male adult, % single parent, % no high school, child poverty rate, median housing value, % moved, and urbanicity). This study used linear multilevel models (i.e., county and state levels) with year fixed effects to handle the nested data structure.

Results:

While controlling for a variety of confounders, higher percentages of foreign-born residents and Latino residents were significantly associated with lower rates of negative child outcomes. A higher percentage of foreign-born residents was significantly associated with a lower maltreatment report rate (coefficient = -0.477 [95% CI = -0.653, -0.313]) and a lower child disability rate (-0.049 [-0.059, -0.038]). These negative associations were also significant among White, Black, and Latino populations. An increased percentage of Latino residents had a significant association with a decreased maltreatment report rate (-0.428 -[0.532, -0.328]). For racial/ethnic subgroups, this association was significant among White populations, but not among Black and Latino populations. The association between the percentage of Latino residents and the child disability rate was not significant for total or within racial/ethnic groups. These associations did not significantly vary by time.

Conclusions/Implications:

The findings of this study strongly confirmed that increased numbers of foreign-born and Latino residents in a community had protective associations with community child maltreatment report rates and child disability rates in the U.S. These protective associations were observed among not only the Latino population, but also the total, White, and Black populations. These findings suggest that sociocultural protective factors among the foreign-born and Latino populations may be transferable to other racial/ethnic groups in a community, perhaps through increased opportunities for social interactions with foreign-born and Latino residents. Further research is warranted for complete knowledge of protective community processes of foreign-born and Latino populations.