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

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As more refugees found their footing, the hui grew fast: from two dozen, to three dozen, to fifty families. Therefore, our analysis instead focuses on how respondents' mortality hazards change with the time elapsed since the survey. 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. I was newly impressed by the parents of a Vietnamese boy who drove an hour to my house so I could tutor him—although he already was an honor student.

In the hypothetical scenarios, the immigrants without eligible mortality records are set to be equally likely (15%), twice as likely (30%), and greater than three times as likely (50%) than natives to have died by 2011.

Park and Myers 2010) relative to the native-born, they tend to have better health in many aspects, including mortality, heart and circulatory disease, obesity, and smoking status (e. Education is categorized as less than high school, high school diploma, some college, and college degree or more.

But they wanted their food clearly identifiable, light on the fish sauce, and free at all times of fat globules, exoskeletons, and eyeballs. Therefore, the health disparities observed at a single time point among those with varying durations of stay may reflect age-based health selectivity rather than the duration effect. Hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans streamed into the United States illegally, fleeing death squads, guerrilla recruiters, or memories of their own murdered families. The faces I noticed in places like Hermann Park, near downtown, reflected that distinctive mix of Latinos, Asians, African Americans, and Anglos.Consistent with this age-based health selection, previous studies found that at the same baseline age (e. The other explanation for the declining health protection from immigrant status is the exposure to racial discrimination and other negative social, economic, and environmental experiences that differentially affect immigrants ( Carrasquillo et al. Within the United States, the shifts in immigrants' destination states over time further add time-related variation in immigration costs ( Massey 2008): states differ in their policies and treatments of immigrants. A few months after visiting Cao Do’s club, I drove to the outskirts of Houston to see what Le had done with his loan. Forty-four percent of medical scientists are foreign born, for example, as are 42 percent of computer software developers.

or among Black immigrants ( Hamilton and Hummer 2011), whereas others reported downward health assimilation ( Antecol and Bedard 2006; Cho et al. Do you know eleven people you’d trust with half your earnings each month, sure they would hand it back the instant you asked? 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.Pronounced to rhyme with “boy,” it is a centuries-old Vietnamese tradition that harnesses peer pressure to force its members to save. 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. My stories bubbled first from ethnic newspapers, day-labor sites, and talking to sources as often as I could over pho. 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. The Industrial Revolution displaced millions of farm workers and resulted in the great urban migrations and the birth of mega-cities to which we now ascribe all kinds of positive attributes, including creativity and innovation and higher wages.

Instead, The Immigrant Advantage is a book about the cultural practices that people bring with them to the U. In the 1990s, it was the fast-growing South and Mountain West states that received immigrants, many for the first time. Even their problems are different now—like other Americans, the hui members have to struggle not to fritter away what they have.Asian, Latino, and Caribbean immigrants show varying rates of mental illness, but consistently reported fewer overall mental problems than the native-born. But the truth was that she had cherry-picked, brilliantly, from Vietnamese and American traditions to raise them. Findings from the model point to the same conclusion: immigrants' odds of death became increasingly lower than those of the native-born—from 19% lower [= 1 – exp(−0. In any case, no prior study of mortality risk directly tested whether immigrants' survival advantage over the native-born changes over real time. When I moved to Houston in the mid-1990s, and landed a real, full-time job at the Chronicle, the city was hurtling through one of the fastest demographic changes any U.