{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.032, 'fraction_numerical': 0.011733333333333333, 'mean_word_length': 5.1107491856677525, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Immigrants and Health Status: Unknown? Distorted?

The topic of this column came to me in a roundabout way. The 2015 January/February issue of Nursing Outlook contained several articles devoted to the health of undocumented immigrants to the US. I read the articles with great interest. However, on reading them I was struck by the dearth of information on the health of this group of immigrants. The articles focused, generally, on the lack of access to health care for the group and on the presumed risks to the health of undocumented individuals living in fear, denied health care, stigmatized, isolated, with few socioeconomic resources, and limited English proficiency. In one of the articles, Messias and colleagues (2015) state that “because the undocumented are unidentified and uncounted, there is a lack of reliable data on the health status of this very diverse group of immigrants. In the absence of actual data, researchers construct indirect health estimates and inferences regarding undocumented immigrants based on assumptions and subset analysis derived from data on the broader foreign-born resident population” (p. 89). Indeed this seemed to be the case for other researchers as well; a computer search of the topic of health status of undocumented immigrants gave me the same results—articles focused mainly on access to health care and the risks these immigrants face that may result in physical or mental illness (Reed, Westfall, Bublitz, Battaglia, & Fickenscher, 2005; Sullivan & Rehm, 2005; Wallace, Torres, Sadegh-Nobari, Purat, & Brown, 2012). In thinking about this, I decided I might be using the wrong words in my search and used “undocumented immigrants and illness” in another search. I got a lot of results—apparently this is a politically sensitive issue. According to some, undocumented immigrants are bringing in epidemics of tuberculosis,