Diminished Advantage or Persistent Protection? A New Approach to Assess Immigrants’ Mortality Advantages Over Time

Abstract

Much research has debated whether immigrants’ health advantages over natives decline with their duration at destination. Most such research has relied on (pooled) cross-sectional data and used years since immigration as a proxy for the duration of residence, leading to the challenge of distilling the duration effect from the confounding cohort-of-arrival and age-of-arrival effects. Because longitudinal studies tend to use self-rated health as the outcome, the changes they observed may reflect shifts in immigrants’ awareness of health problems. 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. Our analysis uses the National Health Interview Survey (1992–2009) with linked mortality data through 2011 (n = 875,306). We find a survival advantage for U.S. immigrants over the nativeborn that persisted or amplified during the 20-year period. Moreover, this advantage persisted for all immigrants, regardless of their race/ethnicity and gender or when they began their U.S. residence. This study provides unequivocal evidence that immigrant status’ health protection as reflected in mortality is stable and long-lasting.