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The international spread of the SARSCoV2 virus that causes the disease COVID-19 has prompted many governments to close their borders. Immigration policy plays an important rolein limiting the international spread of contagious diseases.

Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, several commentators were concerned that immigrants especially illegal immigrants were spreading serious diseases in the United States. This blog post is the first in aseries to answer the question of whether immigrants spread serious notifiable diseases other than COVID-19in the United States. This post focuses on all pooled notifiable diseases for which there are vaccination requirements to enter the United States.

Methods

This post tests the correlation between the incidence of notifiable diseases and immigrant population shares on the state level for the 20102018 period. We use annual, statelevel data on notifiable disease cases from the CDCs National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS), which reports the number of nationally notifiable infectious diseases and conditions by state and year. Anotifiable disease is one where the CDC states that regular, frequent, and timely information regarding individual cases is considered necessary for the prevention and control of the disease.

Numerous diseases are reported to the CDC, but this post focuses on diseases that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and CDC require vaccination for prior to immigration. USCIS requires vaccination for mumps, measles, rubella, polio, tetanus, diphtheria toxoids, pertussis, haemophilius influenza type B, and hepatitis B. The CDC requires vaccination for hepatitis B, varicella, seasonal influenza, pneumococcal pneumonia, rotavirus, hepatitis A, and meningococcal disease.

Data for the foreignborn population on the statelevel comes from the American Community Survey (ACS) provided by IPUMS. From the raw ACS microdata, we can identify immigrants by their nativity, citizenship status, and year of arrival. Afurther strength of the ACS microdata is that we can apply statistical techniques to identify likely illegal immigrants from observed characteristics in the data. Specifically, we use the residual technique of Christian Gunadi to identify illegal immigrants.

Results

To test whether states with higher immigrant shares experience higher rates of notifiable disease, we run atwoway fixed effects regression to estimate the correlation between the rate of disease per 100,000 population and the share of immigrants in astate. The regressions use state and year fixed effects and the standard errors are clustered at the state level.

Table 1shows the results of the regressions. They are all statistically insignificant except a1 percent increase in the share of astates legal immigrant population is correlated with 4.2 fewer cases of disease per 100,000 state residents, which is significant at the 5percent level. There is no relationship between the share of astates population that is foreignborn and the rate of disease per 100,000 residents. There is also no relationship between the illegal immigrant share of astates population and the rate of disease per 100,000 residents.

Figure 1shows the lack of arelationship between the immigrant share of the population and the incidence of these diseases on the state level. Figure 2shows no relationship between the illegal immigrant share of state populations and the incidence of these reportable diseases.

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No Relationship Between Notifiable Diseases and Immigrant Populations - Cato Institute