At the Intersection of Adverse Life Course Pathways: The Effects on Health by Migration Status

Adverse life events are major causes of declin ing health and well-being, but the effects vary across sub pop u la tions. We ana lyze how the inter sec tion of migra tion sta tus and sex relates to two main adverse life events-job loss and divorce-thereby affect ing indi vid ual health and well-being tra jec to ries. Using data from the Ger man Socio-Economic Panel (1984-2017), we apply descrip tive tech niques and indi vid ual fixed-effects regres sions to ana lyze how job loss and divorce influ ence the health of immi grants and non im mi grants. Our results sup port the hypoth e sis that immi grants suffer more from adverse life events than non im mi grants in both the short and the long run. Relative to non im mi grants, immi grants have a health advan tage at youn ger ages, which becomes a dis ad van tage at older ages, and this faster decline at older ages is par tic u larly steep among immi grants who expe ri ence adverse life events. These results help explain the vanishing health advan tage of immi grants by show ing that they are exposed to a dou ble dis ad van tage over the life course: immi grants are more likely than non im mi grants to suffer from adverse life events, such as job loss, and these events typi cally have a larger impact on their health. Our find ings are the first to pro vide evi dence regard ing the con se quences of differ ent adverse life events and how they relate to the inter sec tion of migra tion sta tus and sex. Moreover, our results high light the impor tance of inter sec tional ana ly ses in research on immi grant health.