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

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We pool the NHIS respondents from 1992 to 2009 and restrict the sample to individuals aged 26–85 at the time of the survey. Kimbro 2009) and exposure to racial discrimination and other negative environmental experiences ( Carrasquillo et al. The term first appeared as the epidemiological paradox, in a groundbreaking 1986 report showing that Latinos in the Southwest lived as long as non-Hispanic whites.

Immigrant workers are also overrepresented among college professors, engineers, mathematicians, nurses, doctors and dentists, to name a few. International trade has similar effects, and workers adversely affected by trade are eligible for federal programs such as Trade Adjustment Assistance. All had come from Vietnam, and all had known each other more than thirty years, since first arriving, penniless, after Saigon’s fall.In other words, we assume these immigrants to be 2–7 times as likely to die than the immigrants with eligible mortality records.

She chronicles the quests of young Indian Americans to find spouses with the close guidance of their parents, revealing the benefits of "assisted marriage, " an American adaptation of arranged marriage. they could experience changes over time in legal status, expansion of local ties, and improved knowledge of the destination language and resources.Third, changes in legal and social environments at destination, such as the implementation of anti-immigrant laws, may amplify (or reduce) immigration costs ( Hamilton et al. 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. Although mortality is conceptually different from health, the health protection from immigrant status might be reasonably expected to lower mortality risk.

As discussed earlier, immigrants' duration of stay may affect their perceived health status through improved health care access and screening. Plotting visas and migrant apprehensions as a share of the nation’s working-age population, reinforces the point that immigration is slowing in both absolute and relative terms.In terms of occupations, immigrants flowed into high-tech jobs during the Internet boom and construction jobs during the 2000s housing boom.

Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. This is not the case for other immigrant groups, whose survival advantages were amplified even with ratios of hazard probabilities. Choi 2012), we shed light on the debate on the durability of this advantage by examining changes in mortality risk of immigrants compared with natives over real time.

Claudia Kolker is an award-winning journalist who has reported from Mexico, El Salvador, the Caribbean, Japan and India. The findings were baffling, because Latinos are burdened with all kinds of health risks: less education, lower income, more obesity than native-born whites. Note that over-time comparisons using a relative scale based on log odds ratios or hazard probability ratios could be less meaningful than those on an absolute scale. 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.