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Social and economic disparities between racial/ethnic groups are a feature of the American context into which immigrants are incorporated and a key determinant of population health. We ask whether racial/ethnic disparities in diabetes vary by nativity and whether native-immigrant disparities in diabetes vary by race and over time in the United States. Using the 2000–2015 National Health Interview Survey, we estimate logistic regressions to examine the interaction of race/ethnicity, nativity, and duration in the US in shaping diabetes patterns. Relative to their native-born co-ethnics, foreign-born Asian adults experience a significant diabetes disadvantage, while foreign-born Hispanic, Black, and White adults experience a significant advantage. Adjusting for obesity, education, and other covariates eliminates the foreign-born advantage for Black and White adults, but it persists for Hispanic adults. The same adjustment accentuates the disadvantage for foreign-born Asian adults. For Black and Hispanic adults, the protective foreign-born effect erodes as duration in the US increases. For foreign-born Asian adults, the immigrant disadvantage appears to grow with duration in the US. Relative to native-born White adults, all non-white groups regardless of nativity see a diabetes disadvantage because the racial/ethnic disadvantage either countervails a foreign-born advantage or amplifies a foreign-born disadvantage. Racial/ethnic differentials in diabetes are considerable and are influenced by each group’s nativity composition. Obesity and (for the foreign-born) time in the US influence these disparities, but do not explain them. These findings underscore the importance of unmeasured, systemic determinants of health in America’s race-conscious society.

This study investigated disparities in dual diagnosis (comorbid substance use and depressive/anxiety disorders) among US adults by nativity and racial–ethnic origin and socioeconomic, cultural, and psychosocial factors that may account for the observed disparities.

The study drew on data from two waves of the National Epidemiological Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. Racial–ethnic categories included African, Asian/Pacific Islander, European, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and other Hispanic/Latino. Substance use and depressive/anxiety disorders were assessed per DSM-IV. A four-category measure of comorbidity was constructed: no substance use or psychiatric disorder; substance use disorder only; depressive/anxiety disorder only; and dual diagnosis. The data were analyzed using multinomial logistic regression.

The prevalence of dual diagnosis was low but varied by nativity, with the highest rates among Europeans and Puerto Ricans born in US states, and the lowest among Mexicans and Asians/Pacific Islanders. The nativity and racial–ethnic effects on likelihood of having dual diagnosis remained significant after all adjustments.

The limitations included measures of immigrant status, race–ethnicity, and stress and potential misdiagnosis of mental disorder among ethnic minorities.

This new knowledge will help to guide public health and health care interventions addressing immigrant mental and behavioral health gaps.

This study addressed the research gap in regard to the prevalence and correlates of dual diagnosis among immigrants and racial–ethnic minorities. The study used the most current and comprehensive data addressing psychiatric conditions among US adults and examined factors rarely captured in epidemiologic surveys (e.g., acculturation).

A central tenet of Progressive era responses to prostitution was the alleged over-representation of white, US-born daughters of foreign parentage in the prostitution population. We detail a statistical error in an influential 1913 study from the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford as an important source of this tenet. Using archival data to more accurately reconstruct the Reformatory population, we find that Black women constituted the only over-represented group, but were all but ignored by reformers. We foreground how ideas about race and immigration informed the social response to prostitution in this period, highlighting the importance of critically analyzing historical sources.

This chapter proposes that efforts to improve our understanding of factors affecting migrant health and longevity in the United States must consider migrants’ labor market incorporation and the structural conditions under which they work. I use public-use death certificate data to examine whether there is a mortality penalty for foreign-born workers in the secondary sector industries of agriculture and construction. I focus on the decade of the 1990s for two contextual and empirical reasons: (1) the decade was characterized by economic restructuring, restrictive immigration policy, increased migration, and dispersion of migrants to new geographic destinations; and (2) the 1990s is an opportunistic decade because 19 states coded the industry and occupation of the decedent during this time. These numerator mortality data and Census denominator data are used to compare all-cause mortality rates between working-age (16–64 years) US-born and foreign-born agricultural and construction workers, the overall foreign-born population, and foreign-born workers in health care – an industry where the foreign-born tend to work in well-paid occupations that are well-regulated by the state. The results show a clear mortality penalty for foreign-born workers in agriculture and construction compared to the overall foreign-born population and foreign-born healthcare workers. The results also show the mortality penalty for foreign-born secondary sector workers varies by industry. These findings support the argument that bringing work into our analyses is critical to understanding the contextual and structural factors affecting migrant health and survival.

We document long-run trends in interstate migration rates, using individual-level data from the U.S. Census for the period 1850–1990. Two measures of migration are calculated. The first considers an individual to have moved if she is residing in a state different from her state of birth. The second considers a family to have moved if it is residing in a state different from the state of birth of one of its young children, allowing us to estimate the timing of moves more precisely. Overall migration propensities have followed a U-shaped trend since 1850, falling until around 1900 and then rising until around 1970. We examine variation in the propensity to make an interstate move by age, sex, race, nativity, region of origin, family structure, and education. Counterfactuals based on probit estimates of the propensity to migrate suggest that the rise in migration of families since 1900 could be explained by increased educational attainment, although education may be serving as a proxy for unmeasured covariates. The decline of interstate migration in the late nineteenth century remains to be explained.

The spread of the Internet has transformed the dating landscape. Given the increasing popularity of online dating and rising immigration to Canada, this study takes an intersectional lens to examine nativity and gender differentials in heterosexual online dating.

In 2018, a random-digit-dial telephone survey was conducted in Canada. Logistic regression models were used to analyze original data from this survey (N = 1,373).

Results show that immigrants are more likely than native-born people to have used online dating in Canada, possibly because international relocation makes it more difficult for immigrants to meet romantic partners in other ways. In online-to-offline transitions, both native-born and immigrant online daters follow gendered scripts where men ask women out for a first date. Finally, immigrant men, who likely have disadvantaged positions in offline dating markets, also experience the least success in finding a long-term partner online.

Extending search theory of relationship formation to online dating, this study advances the understanding of change and continuity in gendered rituals and mate-selection processes in the digital and globalization era. Integrating search theory and intersectionality theory, this study highlights the efficiency of using the Internet to search for romantic partners and the socially constructed hierarchy of desirability as interrelated mechanisms that produce divergent online dating outcomes across social groups. Internet dating, instead of acting as an agent of social change, may reproduce normative dating practices and existing hierarchies of desirability.

Past studies of the empirical relationship between immigration and crime during the first major wave of immigration have focused on violent crime in cities and have relied on data with serious limitations regarding nativity information. We analyze administrative data from Pennsylvania prisons, with high-quality information on nativity and demographic characteristics. The latter allow us to construct incarceration rates for detailed population groups using U.S. Census data. The raw gap in incarceration rates for the foreign and native born is large, in accord with the extremely high concern at the time about immigrant criminality. But adjusting for age and gender greatly narrows that observed gap. Particularly striking are the urban/rural differences. Immigrants were concentrated in large cities where reported crime rates were higher. However, within rural counties, the foreign born had much higher incarceration rates than the native born. The interaction of nativity with urban residence explains much of the observed aggregate differentials in incarceration rates. Finally, we find that the foreign born, especially the Irish, consistently have higher incarceration rates for violent crimes, but from 1850 to 1860 the natives largely closed the gap with the foreign born for property offenses.

When immigrants experience “nationality discrimination” in the labor market, ceteris paribus their earnings are lower than native-born workers because they were born abroad. The challenge to testing for nationality discrimination is that the native/immigrant earnings gap will very likely also be influenced by productivity differences driven by incomplete assimilation of immigrants, as well as the possibility of racial or gender discrimination. There is relatively little empirical literature, and virtually no theoretical literature, on this type of discrimination. In this study, a model of nationality discrimination where customer prejudice and native/immigrant productivity differences jointly influence the earnings gap is presented. We derive an extension of Becker's market discrimination coefficient (MDC), applied to the case of nationality discrimination when there are productivity differences. A number of novel implications are obtained. We find, for example, that the MDC depends upon relative immigrant productivity and relative immigrant labor supply. We test the model on data for hitters and pitchers in Major League Baseball, an industry with a history of immigration, potential for customer discrimination, and clean detailed microdata on worker productivities and race. Ordinary least squares (OLS) and decomposition methods are used to estimate the extent of discrimination. We find no compelling evidence of discrimination in the hitter group, but evidence of ceteris paribus underpayment of immigrant pitchers. While our test case is for a particular industry, our theoretical model, empirical specifications, and general research design are quite generalizable to many other labor markets.

Purpose – This chapter focuses on the family and school influences on the achievement gaps in math and reading by gender, race, and nativity.

Methodology – With the longitudinal data from the National Education Longitudinal Studies, this chapter uses panel data technique to model for the changes of the achievement from the three time points of observation, 8th grade, 10th grade, and 12th grade. This study proposes the concept of “low-level constrained curriculum” to characterize the curriculum structure that leads to the universal low level of course taking among students within the same school.

Findings – The analysis shows that this kind of curriculum structure has the most damaging effect on individual students' math achievement outcomes. For the analysis on parental involvement, the results show that school involvement is more effective than home involvement for math achievement, but not for reading. Domain-specific parental involvement is more important than general parental involvement for both math and reading. These findings have important theoretical and policy implications.

The “Social Determinants of Health” construct is well-entrenched in the way that both health care providers and researchers think about the effects of social conditions on health. Although there are a number of theories that fall under this rubric for the social production of health and illness, the core of this construct is the idea that social stratification leads to health disparity. In this chapter we show how such a mechanism might work for relating social stratification and job stress.

We used the pooled 2002, 2006, 2010 Quality of Work Life modules of the General Social Survey to test a model of the relationships between gender, age, education, and nativity with “bad jobs” and indicators of health status.

Findings show that social status is positively associated with job quality and with health in turn. Lower social status characteristics are related to bad jobs and poorer health.

Health disparities are thus “explained” by the consequences of social status for occupation and job quality, thereby depicting exactly how health disparities arise in normal social life. The theory and results underscore the importance of explicitly modeling social status factors in explanations of health disparities.

It is common to relate health disparities to social status but it is not common to show the mechanisms whereby social status actually produces health disparities. Addressing health disparities means addressing the consequences of social inequalities for normal activities of social life such as work. Improving job quality would be a health “treatment” that addresses health disparities.

This chapter demonstrates the value of explicitly tracing the consequences of status differences on differences in social context such as work conditions and then health. In the study of health disparities this is not often done. In this chapter we show how social inequality leads to occupational and job quality differences that, in turn, lead to health differences.