The Burden of Climate Change on Immigrant Workers: Segregation into Environmentally Hazardous Occupations Among Latin American Immigrants in the United States

Across high-income immigrant-receiving countries, entrenched occupational segregation disproportionately funnels immigrants—especially from low income countries— into riskier jobs with higher rates of illnesses, injuries, and fatalities and “3-D jobs” that entail “dirty, demeaning, or dangerous” work, with implications for individual health and well-being and population-level health disparities. Climate change threatens to further exacerbate these risks and inequities, increasing workers’ exposure to extreme temperatures, poor air quality, and other health risks. Yet, to date, research has paid little attention to the burden of climate change on immigrant workers’ health risks.

Integrating insights from literatures on immigrant integration, social determinants of health, and environmental inequality and using data from the 2018-2022 American Community Survey linked to the O*NET database of occupational characteristics, this study examines the segregation of Latin American immigrants into environmentally hazardous occupations. We model the likelihood of employment in three categories of environmentally hazardous occupations: 1) occupations with a high frequency of working in extreme temperatures; 2) occupations with a high frequency of working outdoors; and 3) occupations with a high frequency of indoor work in non-climate-controlled settings.

We first examine whether racialized patterns of segregation into environmentally hazardous occupations exist by comparing the likelihood of employment in such occupations for Latin American immigrants relative to their U.S.-born counterparts in other racial/ethnic groups. Then, to understand how their risk of employment is further patterned by sociodemographic and migration characteristics, we restrict the sample to immigrants only, and estimate whether citizenship status, English language proficiency, duration of residence in the U.S., and education level predict the likelihood of employment in environmentally hazardous occupations.