Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.h.u.edu.

That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, immigration and the 2024 election, Dr. Kiera Alvarez is a psychologist

and Bloomberg assistant professor of American Health at Johns Hopkins, and Dr. Sarah Polk is the

medical director of the Central Soul Clinic at Johns Hopkins. They joined Dr. Josh Sharfstein to discuss

the policy differences as well as the differences in rhetoric between the Trump and Harris campaigns.

They also discussed the importance of congressional elections in achieving a bipartisan immigration solution.

Let's listen.

Dr. Kira Alvarez, Dr. Sarah Polk, thank you so much for joining me to talk about the issue of immigration in this presidential election and its implications for health.

There's a lot of talk about immigration in this highly contested presidential election in particular.

I want to ask you what comes to mind first when I say immigration,

election, 24. Dr. Albaris? Well, I think what comes to mind for me is certainly the

extreme rhetoric from the Trump campaign regarding immigrants and regarding immigration, you know,

starting with the notion that there would be or could be mass deportation of 11 million

people in the United States, which is something that we've never sort of seen or proposed

at that scale. And as much as we may know logistically that that is actually impossible,

it is also something that, you know, a weapon to really be used to so fear and to

really cause negative consequences for immigrants and for people of color in the U.S. generally.

Are you saying that this is, on the one hand, a policy proposal, but on another hand, a little

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