Converging to American: Healthy Immigrant Effect in Children of Immigrants

摘要

The analysis of immigration and health assimilation has been focused on the adult population, with large attention on immigrants' labor market assimilation and the tendency of adult immigrants to converge to unhealthy health status levels through years living in the United States (Jasso, Massey, and Smith 2004). This phenomenon has been called the Healthy Immigrant Effect-henceforth, HIE-(Stephen et al. 1994; Antecol and Bedard 2006). What has not been in the center of this discussion is the effect of this assimilation process and its underlying intergen-erational effect on the younger population. This paper intends to shed some light on the effect of the parental assimilation process and children of immigrants' health to provide evidence of this intergenerational assimilation effect. Are children of immigrants converging to their native counterparts the longer their parents reside in the country?