Messaging Guidance & Learnings from the Field on Immigrant Health Justice

  • January 8, 2026
  • 0

Challenge

Advocates working to advance health justice for immigrants face a rapidly changing and increasingly hostile environment, especially in 2025: critical protections for undocumented people and access to health care have been rolled back in many states, and attacks on immigrant communities have increased in both frequency and intensity. 

Community Catalyst and its Voices for Health Justice partners working at state and national levels recognized a need to develop and implement effective messages to advance progress and mitigate backsliding. They partnered with Wonder for Good to strengthen advocates’ advocacy and narrative change capacities while testing messages and gleaning new learnings in the field. These efforts, co-designed with input from Voices partners, supported immediate rapid response needs and also developed narratives that could help shift public opinion and build long-term support for immigrant communities to have access to health care. The workshops and coaching from Wonder also successfully increased advocates’ narrative capacities such as: developing persuasive messaging to shift audience mindsets, building narrative power, and measuring the impact of narrative change.

Heartwired Insights

Building on a rich body of existing research on immigration in The Ultimate Messaging Guide to Winning the Immigration Narrative and applying evidence-based strategies grounded in the Heartwired approach, Wonder guided advocates through a series of interactive workshops designed to strengthen their understanding of five Heartwired principles for effective messages: build trust, acknowledge complexity, calm concerns, nurture compassion, and activate hope. Applied together, these five principles calm audiences’ downstairs brain and engage their upstairs brain to unlock greater empathy and compassion — and move them to greater support for immigrant health care. 

“As an organization, we realized we were really lacking in the ‘activating hope’ step. Historically, it’s been ‘doom and gloom,’ like ‘the big, bad thing is happening.’ But activating hope is necessary for outcomes — we shouldn’t focus on just the harms.” — Advocate, Community Catalyst

Wonder developed a set of messaging recommendations that are designed to: 

  • Disrupt and replace flawed mental templates of immigrants.
  • Foster audience identification through shared values and generate new emotional reactions.
  • Repair broken reasoning chains about immigrants and health care. 
  • Paint a picture of the problem and connect the dots to the solution.

Results

Leveraging opportunities within their unique contexts, advocates applied the messaging recommendations to their work over the course of several months. Each of their applications of the Heartwired approach and recommendations — from developing strategic messaging training for state-based coalitions to refining talking points to defend Medicaid — yielded valuable learnings, which are now available to the field in Changing the Narrative: A Messaging Guide for Immigrant Health Justice.

“We can utilize the messaging we have co-created as the framework for future legislative battles. We will be able to apply this framework to other areas of our work, and bring this back to our policy team to build upon testimony and facts to create a larger narrative.” — Advocate, Colorado Consumer Health Initiative

Further building on these learnings, Community Catalyst and Wonder conducted a rapid message test to identify the messages and messengers most effective at countering opposition to the expansion of publicly-funded health care coverage options (e.g., Medicaid) for immigrants. 

Our testing showed:

  • Effective messages not only strengthen support for expanding access to health coverage for immigrants but can also neutralize opposition on this topic.
  • Framing around redirecting blame from immigrants and holding corporations accountable proves effective in building support among our audiences.

This message above was most effective in moving audiences to be more aligned with our positions on publicly-funded health coverage.

For increasing support for universal access to publicly-funded health coverage, it was particularly persuasive among these sub-groups:

  • Independent +16
  • Household income: $50k-$99k/year +15
  • Men +11

For increasing support on universal eligibility for Medicaid, it was particularly persuasive among these sub-groups: 

  • Latino +21
  • Household income: $50k-$99k/year +13
  • Non-parent +10
  • Conservative +10
  • Suburban +10

For detailed insights from the rapid message test, download Changing the Narrative: A Messaging Guide for Immigrant Health Justice.