ARCHIVED – Health Status and Social Capital of Recent Immigrants in Canada: Evidence from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada

Abstract

Given that immigrants represent a large proportion of Canadian population growth, their health status is of particular interest to researchers, policy-makers, and program officials. Due to data limitations, there is little Canadian research on the disparities of health status among immigration categories, i.e., family class immigrants, economic class immigrants, and refugees. As well, there are few studies that examine the impact of social capital on immigrant health status at the quantitative level. This paper addresses these gaps through econometric analyses. Using data from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada (LSIC), we look at the dynamic changes in the health status of recent immigrants in their initial four years in Canada, focusing particularly on the effect of social capital on immigrant health. Our descriptive and regression results provide support for the “healthy immigrant effect”; however, the results show that this effect diminishes over time. Our results also suggest health status disparities between recent immigrant sub-groups. Skilled worker principal applicants are more likely to be generally healthy, while refugees are more likely to rate their health status as fair or poor. Looking at the effects of selected social capital variables, we confirm the connections between friendship networks and health status of recent immigrants. The density and ethnic diversity of friendship networks are positively associated with immigrants’ self-rated overall health status. For family class immigrants, the analysis reveals a positive association between organizational networks and self-rated health status. In general, social networks are found to have stronger effects on the health status of family class immigrants than for immigrants in other categories.

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