Abstract
There are numerous ways in which migration and health influence each other, but only modest attention was devoted to these relationships in published research until the 1980s. It is reasonable to expect linkages between migration and health for several reasons. Migrants tend to be a selected subgroup of people from their area of origin and they often carry with them unique lifestyles and health attributes. The process of migrating from one place to another often has important health consequences for both the migrants and the people to whom they are exposed in the place of destination.
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Notes
- 1.
Foreign-born persons at a given date for a given country may be represented as the survivors of immigrants to that date, less emigrants to that date, for the country.
$${\mathrm{P}}_{\mathrm{fb}} = \mathrm{I}\,{_\ast}\,\mathrm{s} -\mathrm{E}$$where the foreign-born population (Pfb) is set equal to the difference between immigrants (I), reduced by a survival rate (s), and emigrants (E). Foreign-born persons may include, for example, persons who immigrated a year earlier as infants, youth, or elderly persons, or elderly persons who immigrated four decades earlier in their youth or six decades earlier as children. The complementary group is the native population, who represent the survivors to the observation date of persons born in the country in question, plus any returning citizens who were born abroad, minus any natives who left the country before the observation date. Data pertaining to a specific year-of-immigration cohort (i.e., foreign-born persons arriving in the same year or group of years) or immigrant birth cohort (i.e., foreign-born persons born in the same year or group of years) define specific current segments of the foreign-born population (year-of-immigration group or birth cohort of immigrants).
- 2.
The U.S. Immigration Act of 1882 prohibited the entry of “idiots and lunatics,” and in 1891 Congress prohibited the entry of aliens if they suffered from “a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease.” The Act of 1893 called for reporting of facts regarding the physical and mental health of alien arrivals at the United States, so as to improve the determination of admissibility according to the expanding list of grounds for exclusion. The 1903 law excluded “insane” persons, and the 1907 law excluded persons with mental and physical defects that could affect their ability to earn a living, and persons afflicted with tuberculosis. The 1917 law expanded the list of mental health conditions for which an alien could be excluded. Thereafter, the law was little concerned with setting health requirements for immigrants. In 1921 and 1924, the restrictions were based on country of origin, with quotas being assigned to various countries. The law of 1961 placed the decision on health conditions meriting exclusion of immigrants from the country in the hands of the U.S. Public Health Service.
- 3.
Even before INRA (1989), the Quota Act of 1921 placed nurses and physicians on a nonquota basis. The 1976 Act placed restrictions on foreign medical school graduates coming to the United States for practice or training in medicine, but the Act of 1977 eased some of these restrictions and exempted alien physicians already in the United States from examination requirements. The 1989 Act (INRA) removed the numerical limitation on certain nurses employed in the United States from securing permanent resident status. The Act of 1996 again tightened restrictions regarding foreign physicians’ ability to work in the United States, but they continued to fall in an occupational preference group.
- 4.
According to the U.S. classification system, inmigrants to a state represent those persons resident in the state at a given date who resided in another state at an earlier date (e.g., 5 years earlier). Nonmigrants are those who resided in the same state at the earlier date as at the census or survey date. Persons living abroad at the earlier date, either citizens or aliens, are treated separately from inmigrants or nonmigrants. Inasmuch as the migration data represent survivors at the end of the period of persons who were alive at the beginning of the period and identify only the initial and terminal residences of each person, only one net move, if any, is recorded for survivors during the period. Hence, the data understate actual events by the number of migrants who died during the period and by the number of multiple moves during the period. For example, a return to the original state of residence would be recorded as nonmigration and “stage” migrants would be counted only once. Children born during the period are excluded, as are persons who have departed for a residence abroad. The same limitations apply to migration data derived from state-of-birth data.
- 5.
This description of events is based on Landon Y. Jones. 2005. Tribal fever. Smithsonian, May 2005.
- 6.
The questions asked how often the respondent experienced these symptoms during the previous 30 days. The response codes for each of the six items ranged from zero (none of the time) to 4 (all of the time) and were summed to yield a total score from zero to 24. A total score of 13 or more was used to define serious psychological stress. The index was developed by Kessler et al. (2002).
- 7.
The Committee on Population of the National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, established a Roundtable on the Demography of Forced Migration in 1999. The Roundtable organized a series of workshops on specific aspects of the demography of refugees, including mortality patterns, fertility, child health, and demographic assessment techniques. The discussion below is based partly on the results of these workshops. See the List of Suggested Readings and References at the end of the chapter for applicable publications.
- 8.
Based on information obtained from Tom Argent, U.S. Committee for Refugees, Brenton T. Burkholder, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Susanne Schmeidl, Center for Refugee Studies, York University.
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Siegel, J.S. (2012). Health and Migration. In: The Demography and Epidemiology of Human Health and Aging. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1315-4_10
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