Skin Tone, Racial/Ethnic, and Gender Differences in Self-Reported Mental and Physical Health among U.S. Lawful Permanent Resident Immigrants

While much research explores how skin tone alongside race/ethnicity and gender intersect to pattern the health of U.S. citizens, less research has examined these processes among U.S. immigrants. We employed ordered and logistic regression to model mental and self-rated health among multiple racial/ethnic immigrant groups using data from two waves of the New Immigrant Survey (N = 2358). Models suggested darker skin shades were associated with higher likelihood of mental health challenges regardless of gender or racial/ethnic identity, though a multiplicative analysis suggested a pronounced gender difference among Black immigrants. In addition, women reported worse self-rated health relative to men; however, the difference for Asian women was smaller than for Black or White women, and Latina women had slightly better self-rated health than Latino men. Indicators of health were not uniform among immigrants of color, illustrating the importance of an intersectional framework that includes skin tone alongside the traditional racial/ethnic binary categories.