Behavioral, Physiological and Psychological Stress among Legal and Unauthorized Brazilian Immigrants: The Moderating Influence of Neighborhood Environments

I use the 2007 Harvard-UMASS Boston Metropolitan Immigrant Health & Legal Status Survey (BM-IHLSS) data to estimate cross-sectional associations of neighborhood-level disorder and social capital with measures of physiological (systemic inflammation), psychological (serious psychological distress) and behavioral (current smoking) stress among adult Brazilian migrants, controlling for sociogeographic and individual characteristics. I further investigate the effect of unauthorized legal status on these stress measures and whether physiological health markers may partially explain associations between distress, smoking and neighborhood environment. Employing logistic regression analysis I find that neighborhood social cohesion is significant and negatively associated with inflammation, serious psychological distress and current smoking while neighborhood disorder is significant and positively associated with inflammation only. Neighborhood-level socioeconomic status, the topic covered most frequently in research on neighborhoods and health, does not appear to be important for predicting any of these three outcomes when social cohesion and disorder are controlled. I additionally find unauthorized legal status to be significant and positively associated with both inflammation and psychological distress. My findings suggest that neighborhood-level social cohesion and unauthorized legal status are important factors in predicting stress levels among Brazilian migrants while neighborhood disorder, measured here primarily as criminal activity and victimization, has a more complicated relationship with stress measures.