Immigrant-native health disparities in ageing societies: an intersectional approach

Immigrants arrive to receiving countries in excellent health. Yet compared to natives their health deteriorates more rapidly.

Why this is the case remains poorly understood due to the scarce availability of large longitudinal datasets useful to explain the dynamic of immigrants’ health over the life-course. In the near future, the immigrant-native health gap is likely to be further exacerbated by population ageing.

In order to formulate effective policies to reduce immigrant-native health gaps, we need a deeper understanding of the causes of the unhealthy ageing of immigrants.MigHealthGaps undertakes the most comprehensive analysis to date into the study of immigrant-native health disparities.

MigHealthGaps has three main research objectives: (1) to quantify the gaps in healthy ageing trajectories between immigrants and natives by age, gender, and socioeconomic status, and their interactions; (2) to determine the impacts of family composition and family ties in generating these gaps; (3) to identify the critical events and circumstances in immigrant lives that put them on a different healthy ageing trajectory from natives.MigHealthGaps addresses these objectives in a comparative and multidisciplinary framework, combining longitudinal survey data with large sample sizes from several European countries, and registry data from the Nordic countries, including the total population.

It applies cutting-edge statistical methods to assess the causality between the above-mentioned mechanisms and the immigrant-native health gaps over age.

The working-age population – including working age immigrants – will soon enter ages at which the risk of developing health frailties will be higher.

Addressing these key objectives is crucial to formulate effective policies to prevent immigrants’ health excessive deterioration, and to make tangible improvements in the process of integrating immigrants into the receiving societies.