Demography of Immigrant Mortality in the United States: Leveraging Novel Census Linkages to Death Records, Earnings Trajectories, and Residential Mobility

In this project, we study the mortality experience of the U.S. foreign-born population in unprecedented detail leveraging innovative individual-level data linkages between census and Social Security records that contain data on over 5 million foreign-born persons. Between 2000 and 2020, the foreign-born population of the U.S. grew by 42% reaching 44 million individuals in 2020. The population has become increasingly diverse by birth country and race/ethnicity. Despite the recent and projected growth and increasing diversity of the foreign born, available data to study their mortality have been limited. We do not know the full extent to which foreign-born subgroups are experiencing differing levels of healthy/unhealthy assimilation and how factors such as birth country, arrival timing, economic mobility, and race/ethnicity shape their mortality. Our proposed project is designed to overcome the challenges faced by previous research by: (1) including a large sample of the foreign born permitting detailed analyses by country and world region of birth and by race/ethnicity; (2) avoiding the numerator/denominator bias that is present when using vital statistics data and census records; (3) capturing deaths occurring outside of the U.S., which avoids “statistical immortality”; and (4) including the role of earnings trajectories as well as other markers of integration (age at migration, duration of US residence, type of education, citizenship, language ability, and household characteristics) to understand key life-cycle determinants of foreign-born mortality.