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

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Second, immigrants' unique behavioral patterns and social capital enhance their health ( Blue and Fenelon 2011; Eschbach et al. The analytic sample consists of 748,106 native-born individuals, among whom 590,833 are White, 105,525 are Black, 2,863 are Asian, and 48,885 are Hispanic; 130,523 are foreign-born individuals, among whom 28,467 are White, 9,803 are Black, 15,196 are Asian, and 77,057 are Hispanic.

In a beautifully written narrative, she takes readers into the living rooms, kitchens, and restaurants of immigrant families and neighborhoods all across the country, exploring the sociable street life of Chicago's "Little Village, " a Mexican enclave with extraordinarily low rates of asthma and heart disease; the focused quiet of Korean afterschool tutoring centers; and the loving, controlled chaos of a Jamaican extended-family home. The Immigrant Advantage may be six years old, but it is hard to think of a more timely book for our higher ed community to discuss.In about thirty years, thanks mainly to immigrants and their children, the rest of America will look much like Houston. I clashed them like cymbals until they nearly splintered, displaying what I considered my inborn Latin beat. A few years later, before moving back to the United States, I began joining Mike to work in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. But her parents themselves were immigrants to Mexico: my grandfather from Honduras and my grandmother, Concepción, from Nicaragua.

Thus, to the extent mortality is tied to health, this study provides unequivocal evidence that the health protection of immigrant status is stable and long-lasting, with no sign of waning after two decades. The predicted hazard probabilities calculated from models in Table 5 (not presented here) reveal similar patterns. Maybe it was the vapor of beef broth, star anise, and garlic I trailed every time I ate this addictive Vietnamese soup. Kimbro 2009) and exposure to racial discrimination and other negative environmental experiences ( Carrasquillo et al. But when he visited my grandmother, Concepción, at school, she felt ashamed of his farmer’s clothes and leather sandals.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. Yet the resources we had—by choice, I reminded myself—differed a lot from those I’d grown up with, and vaguely assumed would have on hand when I had kids of my own. 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. Today, Cao Do’s hui includes military officers, engineers, and business owners who use banks and credit cards as well.

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. Taken together, these customs also illuminate a riddle that epidemiologists have studied for decades. Consistent with this age-based health selection, previous studies found that at the same baseline age (e. The hazard probability for foreign-born individuals was approximately 19% lower in the year of the survey and 34% lower 19 years later.Longitudinal studies are similarly limited partly because of their reliance on self-reported health as the outcome variable. For parsimony, we present the findings from models using a continuous elapsed-time variable in the main text; those based on the 20 elapsed-time dummy variables are shown in the online appendix. Muslims say goodbye, not with top-of-the line casket hardware, but by lovingly hand-washing the body.