(Re)Tracing borders: A critical discourse analysis of the research on Latinx mental health impacts of U.S. immigration enforcement

Abstract

Social science research has documented the adverse mental health outcomes of U.S. immigration enforcement activity on Latinx immigrant individuals and families. Though informative, decolonial scholars have underscored the importance of contextualizing adverse mental health, particularly to explicitly link individual outcomes to the broader oppressive systems that produce them. For this article, I conducted a critical discourse analysis of 51 peer‐reviewed journal articles to determine the extent to which social science researchers contextualize enforcement and its impacts, and to consider the implications of these efforts for how this problem is understood. I present four major tendencies of this sample: (1) the emphasis on contemporary U.S. politics, (2) the limited engagement with the topic of race and racism, (3) the weight it places on health risk, and (4) the use of diagnostic instruments and other measures. I argue that these tendencies work in tandem to portray immigration enforcement as a “colorblind” product of U.S. contemporary politics and construct a “Latinx” immigrant health crisis. This narrowly circumscribes the racialized, gendered, and classed effects of borders and reinscribes Otherness to the affected communities. Future research should leverage critical border scholarship to radically contextualize the immigration enforcement problem.