The Immigrant Advantage: What We Can Learn from Newcomers to America about Health, Happiness and Hope

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Regardless how they get here, people who immigrate also tend to be optimistic and committed to improving their lives, and both correlate with health. Do you know eleven people you’d trust with half your earnings each month, sure they would hand it back the instant you asked? We measure the duration of exposure by year instead of quarter-year to avoid generating an unnecessarily large data set that is computationally difficult to handle. But between roughly 1880 and 1920, with nearly 15 million newcomers, mostly Italians, Slavs, Greeks, or Jews, Americans lashed out. Finally, because immigrants of various races and ethnicities may assimilate at different paces and may be exposed to differing levels of discrimination ( Villarreal and Tamborini 2018), their temporal mortality patterns are potentially diverse.

She found that foreign-born individuals report better health than native-born individuals at age 50 but that some foreign-born groups, such as Hispanics and those who migrated at older ages, experience steeper health declines since age 50 than the native-born. There is a book waiting to be written on what we can all learn from the study practices of international students and the teaching practices of international professors. Relatively few cross-sectional studies have recognized that the duration-of-residence effect can also be confounded with the age-of-arrival effect. First, healthier individuals are more likely to self-select into migration ( Akresh and Frank 2008; Bosdriesz et al. It’s common now to pop into a Kim Son at lunch and see Latinos, blacks, and sixth-generation Texans happily wrapping their spring rolls in lettuce.As the clinic workers and patients told me what they survived, the unfurling peace process transfixed me. Between them, he and Do recruited eighteen other families, all of them scrambling for a toehold in the new country. Immigrants' improved health care access with longer residence may increase the diagnoses of preexisting conditions (e. With natives as the reference group, positive coefficients for the interactions indicate that the immigrant survival advantage diminishes over time on a relative scale, whereas negative coefficients indicate an extended health advantage.

To add evidence on the durability of health protection for immigrants, we utilize an unusually large data set containing a general adult population and a sizable number of immigrants. Asian, Latino, and Caribbean immigrants show varying rates of mental illness, but consistently reported fewer overall mental problems than the native-born.

Again, though, it is more important to examine the difference in hazard probabilities, an absolute measure. Because immigrants arriving at various periods may differ in selectivity owing to shifts in the origin's sociodemographic conditions and policy changes in the destination, the cohort of arrival could explain why immigrants of varying durations of stay exhibit differing extents of health advantage in cross-sectional data. Table 4 presents the racial/ethnic and gender heterogeneities in the immigrant survival advantage over natives. Because the NHIS data are linked to mortality records, we can determine the exact elapsed time since the survey year in which a death occurred. In turn, immigrants likely have increased receipt of preventative health checks, diagnoses, and medical treatments as their stay lengthens, which should widen their health or mortality advantage over the native-born.

Thus, health disparities by nativity at each age cannot explain immigrants' increasing survival advantage over time.

But it is a religious rite, and the customs I was interested in had to stand on their own, independent of the faith or even the culture that created them. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. The foregoing discussion explains the identification challenges in using (pooled) cross-sectional data to capture the variation in health by immigrants' duration of residence. As an exception, Angel and colleagues (2010) addressed within-generation shifts in mortality hazards using age at migration as a proxy for the length of stay.