Multicultural Comfort and Faith in Latino Immigrant Well-Being in Georgia's Atlanta-Dalton Corridor.

This study examines the psychological well-being of community-recruited Latino immigrants in Georgia's Atlanta-Dalton corridor, focusing on cultural, structural, and belief-based determinants of thriving in a nontraditional immigrant destination. Drawing on a secondary survey and focus group data collected by the Atlanta-based Latin American Association, we investigate how multicultural comfort, immigration status, religious worldview, and socioeconomic factors jointly predict psychological well-being. The sample included 479 Latino immigrants, with measures including demographic characteristics, income, education, employment, English proficiency, multicultural comfort, religious influence, and well-being (assessed via the Brief Inventory of Thriving). Hierarchical regression models evaluated the unique contributions of these variables. Findings reveal that multicultural comfort emerged as the strongest predictor of well-being in the present sample, followed by income and religious worldview. In the complete-case analysis, immigration status showed a suggestive pattern: undocumented immigrants and permanent residents reported higher well-being than U.S.-born Latinos. However, multiple imputation sensitivity analysis indicated that these immigration status effects were not robust to the inclusion of cases lost to listwise deletion, whereas multicultural comfort, income, and religious worldview remained significant predictors across both analytic approaches; employment was significant under classical but not heteroscedasticity-robust standard errors. English proficiency and education were not significant in either analysis. These results highlight the importance of emotional inclusion, stable resources, and meaning-making systems in promoting well-being, while suggesting that observed differences by immigration status may partly reflect differential survey completion patterns rather than population-level effects. Policy implications include promoting multicultural belonging, expanding economic opportunities, supporting legal integration, and leveraging faith-based networks as resilience resources.