ABSTRACT
Despite a growing body of research about the negative impacts of an unlawful documentation status on immigrants’ wellbeing, limited studies have examined immigrants’ documentation status from a dynamic perspective. This study analyses data from the New Immigrant Survey to investigate the relationships between racial–ethnic identity, exposure to a precarious documentation status, and self-rated health. Using linear probability and inverse probability weighted models, this study finds that having been previously in a precarious documentation status and spending more years in this circumstance are associated with poorer self-rated health at the baseline survey period (2003). In the follow-up period (2007–2009), the relationship between previous individual-level exposure to a precarious documentation status and self-rated health attenuated and became statistically insignificant after controlling for demographic and socioeconomic factors. Latinx and Asian immigrants disproportionately spend longer periods of time in precarious documentation statuses and tend to have worse self-rated health in the follow-up period compared with White immigrants. Overall, this study points to the importance of conceptualising documentation status as dynamic and to study it acknowledging the racialized nature of this exposure.