Health consequences of migration: An exploration of migration, parental health and generations

• In Event: Immigrant Health - Changing Contexts, Heterogeneity, Resilience, and Selectivity

Abstract

Health outcomes of migrant populations receive increasingly more attention from researchers and policymakers alike. Recent research finds that migrants are often healthier than their so-called ‘native’ counterparts, but this effect decreases as they stay in the destination context. However, how migrants are faring in terms of their health in comparison to those they have left behind in the origin context is still to be explored.
The limited research shows that migrants have better subjective wellbeing than those left behind, but we do not know if health outcomes show a similar pattern. In this research we ask (a) whether migrants and their descendants have better health outcomes than stayers in the origin context and (b) to what extent parental health is transmitted in migrant and non-migrant families.
We use the 2000 Families Survey (Guveli et al, 2016), a multigenerational and multisite study about Turkish labour migrants and their descendants in Europe and the non-migrants of comparable backgrounds who stayed in Turkey. We use subjective (self-rated health) and objective health (whether they have a serious health problem) measures and explore how these outcomes differ across different migration statuses and to what extent parental health is transmitted in migrant and non-migrant families, using logistic regression models.
Our results show that both first generation and second-generation migrants fare better in terms of their objective health than non-migrants. In subjective health, we only see a positive difference for second generation migrants. Both parental subjective and objective health has a positive impact on respondent’s subjective and objective health respectively, but these effects do not differ across different migrant statuses.

Authors

• Sait Bayrakdar, University of Warwick

• Ayse Guveli, University of Warwick