Pollution Unequally Affects Latinos, Immigrant Communities

Air pollution might place an unequal health burden on the poorest of Americans. That's the finding of a new paper, which looked at pollution exposure at the population level.

The findings, from Washington State University published in the journal Social Science Review, are just the latest to correlate minorities and low-income Americans of all ethnic groups to areas of higher air pollution. Of particular concern is particulate matter, the microscopic particles emitted from manufacturing and automobiles that can cause cancer, heart disease, respiratory illnesses, birth defects and a host of other ills.

Non-English-speaking immigrants, who are more likely to be Latino, bear the worst of this burden, lead paper author Raoul Liévanos, Ph.D., an assistant professor of sociology at WSU, told weather.com. The underlying reason for this, he said, is that minority immigrant communities are often clustered near pollution-clogged freeways and industrial areas, a trend spanning back to the city planning developments of the late 1800s.

“It seems to be that there are these important historical residential patterns, really shaped by historical housing policies,” he said. “That really informed how these communities were set up and who is living there now.”

The paper correlated U.S. census data with detailed EPA maps of particulate pollution, including industrial and automobile sources, and found that at the regional level, Latinos were the most-likely to live in areas of high pollution. Other minority groups were also highly affected, as were low-income white Americans.

"That may be suggesting that around freeways and industrial areas, in the regional context, it is, a lot of time, the non-white immigrants that are clustered more closely [to these areas]," Liévanos said. Low-income whites are likely to live in these areas as well, just slightly farther away from the primary sources of contamination. 

The findings show an association between Latino communities and pollution and do not attempt to discover the rate of pollution-related diseases among these populations. But the data could serve as a guide to future work investigating the burden of pollution on individuals, Liévanos said. Public-health interventions in these cities should be tailored to non-English speaking populations and these communities should be included in future urban planning processes, he said as well.

The paper, "Race, deprivation, and immigrant isolation: The spatial demography of air-toxic clusters in the continental United States," was published in the November issue of Social Science Research.

Source: Published originally on weather.com as Study: Pollution Unequally Affects Latinos, Immigrant Communities, November 2, 2015.

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