This story looks at a number of recent studies linking the stress of racial discrimination to poor health outcomes, including work by Arline Geronimus, Nicole Novak, and Aresha Martinez-Cardoso that analyzed the impact on birth weights of babies born to Latina women living in Iowa of the immigration raid at the Postville, IA meat-processing plant. In that raid, 900 federal agents arrested “almost everyone they encountered who looked Latino” – or about 400 workers – detaining many for days at a fairgrounds. In the months after the raid, Geronimus says: “Pregnant women of Latino descent throughout the state of Iowa – including those who were U.S. citizens, including those who were not right at Postville – experienced, on average, about a 24 percent greater risk of their babies having a low birth weight than they had in that very same period of time the previous year.”

More about Geronimus says Postville raid had cascading effects on health of Latinos >