Supporting Immigrant and Refugee Families through Home Visiting: Innovative State and Local Approaches

Home visiting programs are becoming a widely accepted way to provide social services to young children and their caretakers across the United States, but such programs are much less likely to reach immigrant households. Visitation programs are designed to support families, promote children’s health and wellbeing, and lead to positive long-term outcomes. For immigrant and refugee families, home visiting can offer integration-related support such as helping parents navigate health and social service systems or cope with migration-related trauma, but immigrant families are less likely to be enrolled in home visiting programs than families with U.S.-born parents due to linguistic and cultural barriers. ”Supporting Immigrant and Refugee Families through Home Visiting: Innovative State and Local Approaches,” published by the Migration Policy Institute, outlines strategies adopted at the county and state levels to address this gap by looking at models in King County, Washington; San Diego County, California; and the states of Illinois and Massachusetts. These case studies suggest steps policymakers, practitioners and stakeholders can take to improve the reach and effectiveness of home visiting services for immigrant families. Strategies include explicitly including at-risk immigrant families in needs assessments and prioritizing services for them, incorporating community and service provider input into program design and making targeted investments to maximize services. Other measures include adjusting procurement policies for organizations, locating home visiting services at trusted community organizations and supporting research (data collection, evaluation, and capacity building) on successful service models. In this way, states and localities can boost equity in service provision while strengthening and broadening their reach into the community.

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