Immigrant Socioeconomic Status and Mortality

Harriet O. Duleep, Urban Institute
Daniel J. Dowhan, U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA)

A disconcerting fact of U.S. society is a pronounced inverse relationship between socioeconomic status and mortality. To shed light on this issue we analyze the mortality experience of U.S. immigrants. As other researchers have found, groups with high immigrant representation such as Hispanics have lower than expected mortality given their socioeconomic status. To unravel this paradox, we explore a hypothesis that speaks to the etiology of socioeconomic mortality differentials. It is not education per se that affects mortality. Rather, education embodies life experiences that promote or dissuade investment in health: the more educated tend to have more experiences that suggest that human-capital investments pay off. This relationship would, however, be society-specific. Immigrant groups with relatively low education could have lower-than-predicted mortality because their schooling, by source-country standards, is relatively high and conveys more positive experiences relevant to human-capital investment than does the same absolute level of education for U.S.-born individuals.