Vol. 2 No. 2 Specials

The Statue of Liberty now salutes airliners descending on JFK airport rather than ships docking at Ellis Island. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the 800,000 immigrants who come to the United States each year experience their new country differently from past generations of newcomers. While resentful nativists in the nineteenth century routinely decried the deterioration of health standards associated with large influxes of immigrants to major cities like New York, surprising new research has found that immigrants today enjoy longer and healthier lives than their US-born counterparts. Although these statistics demonstrate the generally improving fortunes of immigrants in America over the last century, their relevance transcends mere historical interest. Why are immigrants living so long, and what does that teach us about improving health standards for all Americans?

The famous poem inscribed on the Statue, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…,” recalls a continuously unrealized ideal. Legal obstacles have prevented immigration by certain groups throughout American history. As a result of the Immigration Act of 1965, the pool of newcomers to the United States has become more selective, increasingly populated by skilled workers. Those granted visas are more driven, more educated, and often healthier than those left behind. The Act also broadened the pool of prospective immigrants, opening the United States to the world – now most immigrants come from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, rather than from Europe.

Of course, moving to a new country continues to present challenges. Upon arriving, many immigrants struggle against steep cultural and linguistic barriers. Outright discrimination, however, though by no means absent, poses a far less serious threat for today’s immigrants than for past generations. Modern America, with a generally high standard of living, typically raises health standards, and immigrants face less of a risk of contracting infectious disease even in the United State’s worst urban environments than in their countries of origin. This might explain why immigrants outlive those they leave behind, but it does little to reveal why immigrant health should outperform the health of US-born Americans.

Despite the advancing fortunes of immigrants over the last decades, they are still more likely to be poor than those born in the United States. Significantly fewer immigrants possess health insurance. This single fact means that much of America’s high-quality, high-technology medical care is unavailable to them, which should put their health at a disadvantage compared to US-born Americans. Yet studies dating from 1960 have consistently found that immigrants have substantially lower mortality rates than their US-born counterparts, lower even those US-born Americans with health insurance.