Rethinking border violence: A socio‐structural analysis of Latinx immigrants' perceptions of and strategies for safety, security, and well‐being

Expanding understandings of immigration as a determinant of health, this paper examines how border violence operates as an enduring socio-structural regime, shaping Latinx immigrants' experiences of safety, (in)security, and well-being in the U.S. Drawing on 30 semi-structured interviews conducted as part of a larger community-based participatory research project, we trace how participants interpret violence and insecurity across pre-migration, migration and post-migration contexts and multiple levels (individual, community and structural). Rather than conceptualizing borders as static lines or migration as a singular event, we conceptualize border violence as a transnational and temporal regime that governs mobility, produces precarity, and structures everyday life long after settlement. Participants' narratives reveal how: (1) structural exclusion and economic insecurity shape perceptions of risk and vulnerability across space and time, (2) how neighborhood-level precarity, securitization, surveillance, and constrained mobility undermine stability and well-being, and (3) how safety is negotiated through relational, symbolic, and material strategies within immigrant communities. By centering migrant' lived interpretations of safety and (in)security, this study advances a socio-structural framework that moves beyond individual or behavioral models of immigrant well-being and highlights border violence as a multiscalar condition that permeates immigrants' lives and shapes their everyday survival.