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

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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. For example, despite the nutrition transition and obesity epidemic at origin and rising obesity and overweight prevalence rates among immigrants over time in the United States, recent Hispanic immigrants have lower body mass index than those who immigrated in 1980 or before ( Antecol and Bedard 2006: tables 5 and 6). Most studies addressing immigrants' diminishing health advantage have used (pooled) cross-sectional data and compared immigrants with varying lengths of time in the destination country to infer the existence of unhealthy assimilation ( Antecol and Bedard 2006; Cho et al. Her father, a small landowner, planted orange trees in a ring around their house to encircle his family in blossoms. Le grew up well-to-do in Tay Ninh Province, South Vietnam, where his father owned a regional bus service.

But they wanted their food clearly identifiable, light on the fish sauce, and free at all times of fat globules, exoskeletons, and eyeballs. The survey data are linked to death records in the National Death Index (NDI) through probabilistic record-matching methods, which use 13 criteria to ascertain the vital status of each respondent. A better way to identify the duration of residence effect is by comparing mortality risk among immigrants relative to the native-born over elapsed time.At the time of data analysis, death records at quarter-year intervals from the NHIS 1992–2009 surveys were available through the end of 2011. Living here, I quickly saw, was like taking a round-the-world balloon tour of the countries that were now reshaping the United States. The findings were baffling, because Latinos are burdened with all kinds of health risks: less education, lower income, more obesity than native-born whites. The NHIS asked the foreign-born to select whether they had been in the United States for 0–4, 5–9, 10–15, or more than 15 years. Kolker explores several practices of immigrant groups, from the cuarentena of Mexican immigrants to Vietnamese money clubs to Korean after-school study programs.

And I’ve witnessed desperate battles, often lost, to preserve families that were the only reason to leave home in the first place.Because these studies also found the former to experience a slower health decline since the baseline age than the latter, it is unlikely that the longer duration of stay and greater extent of unhealthy assimilation or exposure to discrimination explain child immigrants' worse health at the baseline age. To uncover the effect of duration of residence on immigrants' mortality, we analyze the patterns and disparities in mortality risk over real time while accounting for age-related mortality hazards. These numbers appear to suggest that immigrants have a survival advantage and that this advantage diminishes with the duration of residence.

Uneasily, I started to daydream about waking up one day as the same person, but in a new country, faced with the kind of obstacles I made my living describing. By the same token, the survival advantages of the 10–14 and 15+ YSI groups should have continued to shrink starting from the year of the survey.Self-rated health is also problematic because different racial/ethnic and nativity groups, who have different cultures and reference groups, may assess their health using diverse criteria ( Finch et al. She shows us the joy, and excitement, of savoring Vietnamese "monthly rice" meals delivered to her front door, hiring a tutor for her two young girls, and finding a powerful sense of community in a money-lending club she started with friends. If you cross without documentation, the desert, human predators, and hunger provide one free of charge. Though he had owed as much as 20 percent interest on his credit cards, he completed all his hui payments first, within twenty-five months. We illuminate the debate by examining how immigrants' mortality risk—a relatively unambiguous measure tied to poor health—changes over time compared to natives' mortality risk.

Owing to the concern of confounding cohort-of-arrival effect, studies using data from multiple survey years have tried to control for this factor and survey year simultaneously and estimate the net effect of duration of residence at destination (e. In general, the over-time increase in the survival advantage was more pronounced for non-White immigrants than for White immigrants, especially among men. Setting the lower bound of age at 26 ensures that most respondents will have finished their education. Moreover, this advantage persisted for all immigrants, regardless of their race/ethnicity and gender or when they began their U.What is costly in the long-term is preventing market forces from funneling resources to their best use. Consistent with this age-based health selection, previous studies found that at the same baseline age (e. At many institutions, the economic model of the university relies on attracting international students. To compare immigrants' mortality risk to native-born people's over elapsed time, we reshape the data set to a person–year format, which starts from the year of the interview and ends in the year of the respondent's death or 2011, whichever is earlier.