Ethnic Attrition, Assimilation, and the Measured Health Outcomes of Mexican Americans

Two puzzles stand out from the immigrant health literature. The assimilation puzzle asks why Hispanic natives often lag well behind non-Hispanic whites on measures of health. The puzzle of immigrant advantage, sometimes referred to as a version of the Hispanic Health Paradox, asks why Hispanic immigrants often have better health than U.S.-born Hispanics. While numerous studies have attempted to explain these patterns, almost all studies rely on subjective measures of ethnic self-identification to identify immigrants’ descendants. This can lead to bias due to “ethnic attrition,” which occurs whenever a U.S.-born descendant of a Hispanic immigrant fails to self-identify as Hispanic. In this paper, we exploit information on parents’ and grandparents’ place of birth to show that Mexican ethnic attrition, operating through intermarriage, is sizable and selective on health, making subsequent generations of Mexican immigrants appear less healthy than they actually are. Consequently, we find that the puzzles of poor assimilation and immigrant advantage have both been significantly overstated.