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Disability and the Immigrant Health Paradox: Gender and Timing of Migration

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Book cover Contextualizing Health and Aging in the Americas

Abstract

Although research has documented better health and longer life expectancy among the foreign-born relative to their U.S.-born counterparts, the U.S. Mexican-origin immigrant population is diverse and the healthy immigrant effect likely varies by key structural and demographic factors such as gender, migration history, and duration in the United States. Using a life course framework, we use data from the Hispanic Established Populations for the Epidemiologic Study of the Elderly (H-EPESE 1993–2013) which includes Mexican-American individuals aged 65 and older to assess the heterogeneity in the immigrant health advantage by age of migration and gender. We find that age of migration is an important delineating factor for disability among both men and women. The healthy immigrant hypothesis is only observable among mid- and late-life migrant men for ADL disability. While among immigrant women, late-life migrants are more likely to have an IADL disability putting them at a health disadvantage. These findings illustrate that Mexican immigrants are not a homogeneous group and migrant health selectivity depends on both gender and when migrants arrived in the United States.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge financial support for this research provided by the National Institute on Aging (R01 AG10939-10, P30AG043097, T32AG000221, and 5T32AG270), and the Nebraska Tobacco Settlement Biomedical Research Development Funds through the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology and Institute for Ethnic Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA

    Marc A. Garcia

  2. Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Adriana M. Reyes

  3. Kent School of Social Work, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA

    Sunshine Rote

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  1. Marc A. Garcia
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Correspondence to Marc A. Garcia .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    William A. Vega

  2. LBJ School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Jacqueline L. Angel

  3. Instituto Nacional de Geriatría, Mexico City, Mexico

    Luis Miguel F. Gutiérrez Robledo

  4. Department of Preventive Medicine and Community Health, The University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, TX, USA

    Kyriakos S. Markides

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Garcia, M.A., Reyes, A.M., Rote, S. (2019). Disability and the Immigrant Health Paradox: Gender and Timing of Migration. In: Vega, W., Angel, J., Gutiérrez Robledo, L., Markides, K. (eds) Contextualizing Health and Aging in the Americas. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00584-9_12

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