The Repository @ St. Cloud State

Open Access Knowledge and Scholarship

Date of Award

6-2021

Culminating Project Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Applied Economics: M.S.

Department

Economics

College

School of Public Affairs

First Advisor

Monica I. Garcia-Perez

Second Advisor

Artatrana Ratha

Third Advisor

Lynn A. Collen

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Keywords and Subject Headings

Access, Healthcare, Citizen, Naturalized-Citizen, Immigrant

Abstract

The United States of America has always been a nation favor by immigrants throughout history. The foreign-born proportion of the U.S. population has been steadily rising since 1970. In fact, 13.3% of the nation's population comprised of immigrants in 2014 is the highest rate registered in 94 years. However, this increase in the number of immigrants has been followed by anti-immigrant sentiment, including some attempts to reduce immigrants' access to the health care system. This study examines the probability of accessing health coverage among immigrants by comparing Naturalized-citizens and not citizen immigrants. A quantitative analysis was used based on immigrants' sex, gender, level of poverty, education attainment, race, and employment status. The results of this analysis provide evidence that after controlling for all these variables, there is a strong and statistically significant relationship between citizenship status and health insurance coverage. Namely, our model estimates an average difference of 12.9% in the probability of having health coverage for naturalized citizens and non-citizens. Moreover, disaggregating the probabilities with respect to Age and citizenship status, we find that the impact of citizenship status diminishes as people get older, but remains significant.

Comments/Acknowledgements

Sincere appreciation goes to Dr. Monica I. Garcia-Perez Dr. Ratha Artatrana and Dr. Lynn Collen for their guidance during the course of this research.

Download

Share

COinS