It is likely that variations in SES contribute to some of the complexities that are evident in the relationship between migration and health. First, for immigrant populations largely made up of low SES individuals, traditional indicators of SES tend to be unrelated to health in the first generation. For example, using national data from a sample of pre-retirement age Latino adults, Angel and colleagues110 found that the association between SES and health varied by immigrant status. Income and education were unrelated to both self-reported physical and mental health among the foreign-born but predicted health, as expected, among the native-born. Financial assets, on the other hand, showed a stronger inverse relationship with self-reported ill health among the foreign-born than the native-born. Second, the SES of immigrants upon arrival to the U.S. affects an immigrant group’s trajectory of health. Thus, given the low SES profile of Hispanic immigrants and their ongoing difficulties with educational and occupational opportunities, the health of Latinos is likely to decline more rapidly than that of Asians and to be worse than the U.S. average in the future.
