Unauthorized Mexican-Born Immigrants, Occupational Injuries, and the use of Medical Services in the United States

Abstract

This article examines how unauthorized immigrant status is associated with the risk of suffering a work-related accident or illness and with the use of medical services after experiencing an injury among Mexican immigrants in the United States. Using individual-level data on 81,004 Mexican immigrants who previously worked in the United States and were interviewed when they returned to Mexico in the Survey of Migration in the Northern Border of Mexico from 2010 to 2018, we estimate a series of probit models and nonlinear decompositions to analyze legal status differences in the incidence of occupational injuries among immigrant workers. The results show that among Mexican immigrants in the United States unauthorized status was associated with a greater probability of experiencing an occupational injury. The higher injury rate among unauthorized immigrants was partly driven by the fact that they worked more hours per day, more days per week, and were employed in riskier occupations than authorized immigrants. If unauthorized immigrants were older and had higher levels of English-language ability, the injury gap would have been even larger. Unauthorized status was also associated with a lower likelihood of using medical services after suffering an occupational injury because unauthorized workers had less access to medical care. The findings show that the right to legal work has important implications for the health of immigrants by setting a higher risk level for injury on the job and limiting access to health care following such an injury.