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Immigrants Changing Rural America |
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Spanish-speaking immigrants, mainly from Mexico, are moving to rural areas in unprecedented numbers, trickling into the corridors of rural health care facilities for treatment and social services. While policy debates and demonstrations on immigration persist, and its effects on rural health care are being measured, demographers are trying to sort out why Hispanics are moving all across the country rather than settling in the southwestern United States, as they have for years. When the Census Bureau collects information for the decennial census, illegal immigrants often hesitate to mark their foreign-born status for fear of being tracked by a government agency. The U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (http://www.samhsa.gov/) provides a list of national mental health helplines in Spanish at http://store.mentalhealth.org/espanol/lineas.aspx. "There are still a lot of stigmas in this community, but I think if they [Hispanics] want to live here and work here and help support our community, that's great," Whitmore said. The mother of all questions facing rural communities is: "Why are you here?" Use of the term "frontier" did not disappear with the days of the Wild West--- it is alive and well at the National Center for Frontier Communities (NCFC). In addition to hosting the federally funded teleconference calls, NARHC serves as a national advocacy organization dedicated to improving the delivery of health care in rural underserved areas through the Rural Health Clinics (RHC) Program. "This document brings to light how vulnerable Mexican immigrants are when it comes to health care, especially regarding health insurance coverage," said Wallace, associate director of the UCLA School of Public Health's Center for Health Policy Research.
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