Untangling the health impact of immigration and acculturation

Considerable research has focused on the (usually) negative impact of migration on immigrant health.  This immigrant health decline is hypothesized to be driven by immigrants’ acculturation to American society and habits.  This is particularly problematic for a country such as the United States which combines a high number of immigrants, bad health habits among the native born, and an expensive health care system.  However, this research tends to compare immigrants to the United States with the health of individuals who did not migrate.  Therefore, some of the health effect may be from migration itself and not acculturation.  This paper separates out these effects by comparing the health impacts of migration within Mexico to migration to the United States.  This allows us to untangle the negative health impact of acculturation and the health impact of migration generally. The empirical analysis is carried out using data from the Mexican Migration Project.  We expect the results will find that the negative impact of United States acculturation has been overestimated in previous studies, as they combine the effect of acculturation and migration generally.  Using data on trip duration and type of crossing into the United States, we are able to parse out the effects of the crossing on health versus acculturation.  This analysis has implications for public policy.  Results which place importance on acculturation lead to policy prescriptions that emphasize keeping migrants connected to their home cultures such as enclaves.  If negative health comes more from the stress of crossing then policies such as expanding guest worker visa programs become more important.  And finally, if there are similar negative health effects from both domestic and U.S. migration then there is another dynamic involving (often) young males working away from their home communities that need to be explored.