Friday, April 10, the College of William and Mary’s Schroeder Center for Health Policy hosted a discussion with Molly Dondero titled “Climates of Exclusion and Immigrants’ Health Across the Life Course.”
Dondero holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. She teaches in the sociology department at American University, specializing in demography.
Dondero’s lecture was separated into four sections: historical and conceptual background, immigrant policies as exclusion, empirical evidence and future directions.
Dondero began by discussing policies impacting immigrant arrivals to the United States, along with their children and broader communities, such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and detainee deaths.
Dondero also explored health-related immigrant policies in the United States’ past and present. These included physical examinations on Ellis and Angel Islands, fumigation of Mexican laborers and Title 42 in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dondero described the global phenomenon of immigrants arriving in host countries relatively healthy, only to experience intergenerational deterioration in health after arrival due to a lack of socioeconomic benefits.
Dondero defined her understanding of exclusion.
“It’s multidimensional, driven by unequal power relationships, it’s interactive, right? It’s not just one dimension acting on its own,” she said. “It intersects, or interacts, with other dimensions to create a web.”
Dondero said that exclusion of immigrants occurs across both macro and micro levels, from broader laws to local and individual contexts. In other words, she sees the politics of exclusion as originating from federal, state and local governments, which impact one another along with immigrants and their communities.
“In adolescence, we see this health burden emerge mainly through mental health outcomes, whether it’s through depression, anxiety or sometimes risk-taking behaviors, as well as access to care,” Dondero said.
She also said that determining the delayed effects of policies and navigating the consequences of disparate policies across government levels is a challenge for researchers.
Dondero then discussed the research she has conducted with her colleagues analyzing state policies’ effects on immigrant healthcare. Dondero also looked at how immigrants interact with non-government and government institutions.
“Immigrant policy restrictiveness decreases the likelihood, or is associated with a decrease in the likelihood of having health provider visit[s], health insurance, public benefits, a bank account,” Dondero said. “Strongest impacts are for first-generation children and for non-citizen adults. Some tentative evidence [shows] that state policy restrictiveness weakens the role of non-governmental institutions as resource brokers.”
Dondero concluded her presentation with several predictions and observations, including the potential for increased exclusion through state policies, difficulties in collecting data and funding for this research and thinking more critically about using economic arguments when discussing immigration.
After the lecture, Dondero explained her research and perspective on immigrant exclusion.
Dondero first earned a bachelor’s degree in English and Spanish from Pennsylvania State University. She then pursued a master’s degree in Latin American Studies at the University of Florida, where she used those skills to follow her interests in immigration and journalism while focusing on more quantitative research.
“[The master’s degree] was interdisciplinary, with a focus on immigration,” she said. “I really got trained in research methods and fell in love with that process and realized that I could still write a lot, like I wanted to do as a journalist.”
Much of Dondero’s research covers “sociological imagination,” the analysis of social structures using real-world experiences.
“It has a lot to do with starting with some simple observations, or seemingly simple observations, and then complicating them by figuring out how they’re socially constructed,” Dondero said.
Dondero said her future research will examine how state and federal policies impact immigrants individually, including their broader impacts on health and power in the United States, particularly in relation to the labor different immigrant communities perform.
Sophie Willson-Quayle ’25 MPP ’27, a graduate assistant, attended the talk to write an article for the Schroeder Center for Health Policy.
Willson-Quayle said she knew about immigrant issues in the context of labor and employment policy, but not in healthcare. She found the immigrant health advantage particularly interesting.
“This ‘puzzle,’ as Dr. Dondero put it, is incredibly interesting and also so tragic in terms of what it means for people who risk everything to go somewhere where opportunities are greater, only for their new environment to be toxic to them,” Willson-Quayle said.
Assistant professor of sociology Esmeralda Sánchez Salazar also attended the lecture. She said she was interested in the coverage of how policy ultimately affects individuals.
“Dr. Dondero’s research is a powerful reminder that discussions about immigration and health are ultimately about real people whose lives are shaped by state policy decisions,” she said. “Sadly, exclusionary state policies often impose the greatest harms on the most vulnerable immigrant populations.”
Associate professor of sociology and Director of the Schroeder Center for Health Policy Elyas Bakhtiari helped organize the event.
Bakhtiari described his two main takeaways.
“Although immigrants appear to be incredibly healthy when looking at aggregate indicators, that doesn’t fully reflect how exclusion and marginalization affect their health and wellbeing,” he wrote in an email. “A second important takeaway, from Professor Dondero’s work and other scholarship on this topic, is that policies aimed at undocumented immigrants often have broader negative impacts on documented immigrants and others.”
