Biography: Goleen Samari is an assistant professor and population health demographer in the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health and Program on Forced Migration and Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Her research considers how racism, gender inequities, and migration-based inequities shape reproductive and population health with a particular focus on populations in or from the Middle East and North Africa. She was the first to draw attention to the racialization of religious minorities and Islamophobia as a public health issue. Her research aims to understand and alleviate intersectional structural determinants of health over the life course and bridge some of the gap between research and policy. Dr. Samari is a former doctoral trainee of the California Center for Population Research, and she earned a Ph.D. in public health, an MPH in community health sciences, and an MA in Islamic studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Structural Xenophobia and Birth Outcomes: The Role of Exclusive Immigration Policies

Anti-immigrant stigma or xenophobia is increasingly pervasive globally. The epidemiological implications of the recent wave of xenophobic policies are increasingly of interest to population health scientists. This talk will present findings from a study that explores the impact of one such policy, the 2017 travel ban on individuals from Muslim majority countries, and birth outcomes among women from those countries residing in the US. We also consider how structural xenophobia can be measured and present a new measure, the immigration policy climate (IPC) index, that captures state immigration policy environments from 2009 to 2019. The IPC index includes fourteen inclusionary and exclusionary policies across all US states and Washington, DC. We will discuss how the IPC index offers opportunities to explore immigrant health and behavioral outcomes including reproductive and maternal health outcomes.

You can access the CCPR seminar using this link.