A Precarious New World: U.S. Immigrants Navigate Contingent Work and the Post-ACA Health Care System

Abstract

Since the mid-1970s, a fundamental restructuring of the United States economic system has pushed risk down production chains and into the labor market through a steady increase of precarious work. As the nature of work has changed in America, a parallel increase in both immigrant policing and cuts to welfare protections has created pockets of categorical inequalities across the nation. Meanwhile, a health care reform breakthrough delivered by the Obama administration’s 2010 Affordable Care Act served to extend coverage to the largest population in American history, even as a broken immigration system limited these expansions to legal immigrants and undocumented workers alike. Using national-level survey data coupled with a qualitative interview study, this thesis explores the ways in which 21st century U.S. immigrants’ disproportionate rates of participation within the contingent workforce compounds already troublesome prospects for attaining quality health care.