Smartphone-Based Maternal Education for the Complementary Feeding of Undernourished Children Under 3 Years of Age in Food-Secure Communities: Randomised Controlled Trial in Urmia, Iran

The mothers’ nutritional literacy is an important determinant of child malnourishment. We assessed the effect of a smartphone-based maternal nutritional education programme for the complementary feeding of undernourished children under 3 years of age in a food-secure middle-income community. The study used a randomised controlled trial design with one intervention arm and one control arm (n = 110; 1:1 ratio) and was performed at one well-child clinic in Urmia, Iran. An educational smartphone application was delivered to the intervention group for a 6-month period while the control group received treatment-as-usual (TAU) with regular check-ups of the child’s development at the well-child centre and the provision of standard nutritional information. The primary outcome measure was change in the indicator of acute undernourishment (i.e., wasting) which is the weight-for-height z-score (WHZ). Children in the smartphone group showed greater wasting status improvement (WHZ +0.65 (95% Confidence Interval (CI) ± 0.16)) than children in the TAU group (WHZ +0.31 (95% CI ± 0.21); p = 0.011) and greater reduction (89.6% vs. 51.5%; p = 0.016) of wasting caseness (i.e., WHZ < −2; yes/no). We conclude that smartphone-based maternal nutritional education in complementary feeding is more effective than TAU for reducing undernourishment among children under 3 years of age in food-secure communities.

Immigration Enforcement and Student Achievement in the Wake of Secure Communities

Over the past decade, U.S. immigration enforcement policies have increasingly targeted unauthorized immigrants residing in the U.S. interior, many of whom are the parents of U.S.-citizen children. Heightened immigration enforcement may affect student achievement through stress, income effects, or student mobility. I use one immigration enforcement policy, Secure Communities, to examine this relationship. I use the staggered activation of Secure Communities across counties to measure its relationship with average achievement for Hispanic students, as well as non-Hispanic Black and White students. I find that the activation of Secure Communities was associated with decreases in average achievement for Hispanic students in English Language Arts as well as Black students in English Language Arts and math. Similarly, I find that increases in removals are associated with decreases in achievement for Hispanic and Black students. I note that the timing of rollout is potentially correlated with other county trends affecting results.

Rethinking the “Gold Standard” of Racial Profiling: §287(g), Secure Communities and Racially Discrepant Police Power

In this article, we explore methodological difficulties related to proving racial profiling, specifically in the context of §287(g) and Secure Communities enforcement. How it is that critical immigration researchers understand racial profiling as the object of their research, and how might they go about substantiating racial profiling in the field? Can racial profiling be made a straightforward object of problematization and, if not, why? We are particularly interested in how racial profiling can be so self-evidently at the core of programs like §287(g) and Secure Communities and yet how racialized law enforcement decisions and tactics are so often inscrutable—and difficult to prove—in the context of routine police work. Building on original fieldwork findings and data on roadblocks by §287(g) and Secure Communities agencies in central North Carolina, we dissect the differences between racially discrepant police work and racial profiling, and argue that chasing the “gold standard” of racial profiling risks leaving racially discrepant policing on the table as an apparently unproblematic, and perhaps even defensible, outcome of policing. As such, we argue that critical scholars should leave aside the problem of proving racial profiling and instead refocus on the problem of racially discrepant policing.

Health and Mental Health Effects of Local Immigration Enforcement

We study the effect of two local immigration enforcement policies — Section 287(g) of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Secure Communities Program (SC) — on the health and mental health outcomes of Latino immigrants living in the United States. We use the restricted-use National Health Interview Survey for 2000–2012 and adopt a difference-in-difference research design. Estimates suggest that SC increased the proportion of Latino immigrants with mental health distress by 2.2 percentage points (14.7%), Task Force Enforcement under Section 287(g) worsened their mental health distress scores by 15 percent (0.08 standard deviation), and Jail Enforcement under Section 287(g) increased the proportion of Latino immigrants reporting fair or poor health by 1 percentage point (11.1%) and lowered the proportion reporting very good or excellent health by 4.8 to 7.0 percentage points (7.8% to 10.9%). These findings are robust to various sensitivity checks and have long-term implications for population health, public health expenditure, and immigrant integration.