The goal of this project is to explore the relationship between health, wealth, and work for elderly persons in the United States, comparing native-born and foreign-born persons. The foreign-born population is one of the least well studied groups in the United States. Preliminary analyses have addressed broad mortality differences between the foreign-born and US-born populations (Kestenbaum, 1986; Swallen, 1996a), and more detail has been presented for infant mortality rates among Hispanic immigrants (Guendelman, et al., 1990; Collins and Shay, 1994; Guendelman and English, 1995), but there has been little effort to describe the health of the foreign-born group. Information on morbidity and mortality that is available often is not detailed enough to informative. Not all immigrants are alike; this research will divide immigrants into groups based on age at first entry to the United States and race or ethnic group. The health differences between these immigrant and native-born groups will be described. The descriptive analysis will examine the varying influences of socioeconomic factors, health behaviors, and demographic factors. In addition, this research will expand on previous research by this PI by considering the influence of occupation on health. Previous work has indicated that immigrants have different mortality and morbidity patterns at old age, depending on their age at time of immigration. This research will explore a slightly younger group of immigrants and see if the differential health patterns are also present for them. In addition, past research did not examine detailed socioeconomic and occupational differences. Multivariate regression models will be created to assess the relationship between the outcomes of interest and the variables tested. Finally, the potential of differential reporting of health between immigrants and US-born persons will be adressed. Previous research has indicated that elderly Americans experience the lowest mortality and morbidity of any country in the world (Manton and Vaupel, 1995). The authors attribute the advantage to greater access to health care in the United States. This proposal is designed to begin to address another potential explanation; the inclusion fo large numbers of healthy, self-selected immigrants in the American population may be related to the good health that elderly Americans experience. The research proposed here is designed to lead to the application for a FIRST or R01 grant for the principal investigator.
