Hispanic Americans live about as long as or longer than non-Hispanic white Americans despite lower average income and less access to health care.
Markides and Coreil named it in 1986 from mortality data that refused to follow the socioeconomic gradient. The candidate explanations are the healthy migrant effect, since migration selects the fit; the salmon-bias effect, since some migrants return home to die and disappear from American death records; mismatches between how ethnicity is recorded on censuses and on death certificates; and protective factors in family structure and diet. The advantage is largest among the foreign-born and weakens across generations.
In practice
- An agency plans services on the assumption that low income predicts poor health, and finds one large group where it does not.
- A study finds migrant workers healthier than the population they left and the one they joined, until they have been in the new country twenty years.
- Possible explanations
- Candidate explanations are the healthy migrant effect, since migration selects the fit; return migration, which removes the sick from American death records; mismatches between census and death-certificate ethnicity; and protective factors in diet and family structure.
- In its favour
- The advantage appears across decades of mortality data and survives in studies that link records individually rather than relying on death certificates.
- Against it
- Better record linkage narrows it, return migration accounts for part of it, and the advantage weakens across generations, which suggests a migration effect rather than a lasting one.
- Standing
- Contested in size rather than existence. Record-linkage studies have narrowed it, and return migration accounts for part but not all of it.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- The measured patterns of social life