Primary Submission Category: Migration
Contextualizing Immigrant Health Trajectories Across the Life Course
Authors:Â Fatima Touma,
Presenting Author: Fatima Touma*
Immigrants in the United States are generally healthier than their U.S.-born counterparts. However, there is evidence that this health advantage might erode with increasing time in the United States. Yet, the erosion of the immigrant health advantage does not necessarily unfold in the same way for all immigrant groups. Moreover, immigrants are a heterogenous group whose incorporation into American society may vary widely across geographic contexts. In this study, I aim to examine immigrant and U.S.-born individuals’ health trajectories across state-level structural xenophobia contexts in the United States. Structural xenophobia, I argue, is a facet of structural racism that is most salient to immigrants. Structural xenophobia refers to the ways in which laws, policies, social institutions, and social norms combine to exclude immigrants from and prevent their incorporation into the host society. Specifically, my research questions are: (1)Do the health trajectories across the life course of foreign- and U.S.-born individuals differ across structural xenophobia contexts? and (2) Do race-ethnicity and gender moderate the relationship between structural xenophobia and the health trajectories of foreign- and U.S.-born individuals? Using data from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, Waves I to V, and latent growth curve models within a Structural Equation Modeling framework, I examine the self-rated health, body mass index, and allostatic load trends of foreign- and U.S.-born respondents from adolescence to early midlife (age 12 to 43). Preliminary results indicate that foreign-born respondents retain a health advantage compared to U.S.-born respondents across the early life course, albeit differing across racial-ethnic and gender groups. The results from this study will help us better understand if welcoming and exclusionary state contexts are associated with improving, maintaining, or declining health as foreign- and U.S.-born individuals age.