Fundamental Cause Theory and Immigrant Mortality During the First Year of the Covid-19 Pandemic

• In Event: Fundamental Cause Theory at 30: Rethinking Health Inequities

Abstract

The Fundamental Cause framework offers a priori predictions about disproportionate mortality risk for many immigrant populations, both due to their socioeconomic status and experiences within the U.S. racial hierarchy. Yet decades of research has shown the opposite: Immigrant populations typically have lower mortality than their non-immigrant counterparts, and socioeconomic gradients for immigrants are often weaker and less predictive than expected. This paper brings together literatures on Fundamental Cause Theory and the demography of the immigrant paradox to consider how selection and protection factors may obscure or alter the relationship between social conditions and mortality for immigrant populations, particularly for non-communicable causes of death with long etiological lags. Initial evidence suggests Covid-19 mortality did not follow this immigrant paradox pattern and aligned more closely with expectations of an immigrant disadvantage. I argue that the short etiological lag of infectious diseases like Covid-19 make immigrant selection and protection factors less salient, allowing the link between social conditions and outcomes to be more clearly observed. Using NVSS mortality data from 2020, I show how the relationship between educational attainment and nativity status varies across Covid-19 and non-Covid deaths and argue the patterns of Covid-19 mortality are a more accurate representation of immigrant populations’ fundamental social conditions.

Author

• Elyas Bakhtiari, College of William and Mary