Guiding Principles for Writing About Immigrants and Immigrant Health

This perspective identifies harmful phrasing and frames in current clinician and researcher work relating to immigrant health and provides equity-centered alternatives. Recommendations are organized within two broad categories, one focused on shifting terminology toward more humanizing language and the second focused on changing frames around immigration discourse. With regards to shifting terminology, this includes: 1) avoiding language that conflates immigrants with criminality (i.e., illegal); 2) using person-first language (i.e., person applying for asylum or detained person rather than asylum-seeker or detainee); 3) avoiding comparisons to native populations to mean non-foreign-born populations, as this contributes to the erasure of Native Americans and indigenous people; 4) avoiding hyperbolic and stigmatizing crisis language about immigrants; and 5) understanding inherent limitations of terms like refugee, asylum seeker, undocumented that are legal not clinical terms. With regards to challenging dominant frames, recommendations include: 6) avoiding problematization of certain borders compared to others (i.e., U.S.-Mexico versus U.S.- Canada border) that contributes to selectively subjecting people to heightened surveillance; 7) recognizing the heterogeneity among immigrants, such as varying reasons for migration along a continuum of agency, ranging from voluntary to involuntary; 8) avoiding setting up a refugee vs. migrant dichotomy, such that only the former is worthy of sympathy; and 9) representing mistrust among immigrants as justified, instead shifting focus to clinicians, researchers, and healthcare systems who must build or rebuild trustworthiness. Ensuring inclusive and humanizing language use and frames is one critical dimension of striving for immigrant health equity.

Automated summary

This perspective identifies harmful phrasing and frames in current clinician and researcher work related to immigrant health and proposes equity-centered alternatives. The recommendations focus on shifting terminology towards humanizing language and challenging dominant frames around immigration discourse. This inclusive and humanizing language use and frames are crucial for achieving immigrant health equity.