Do Mexican Immigrants “Import” Social Gradients in Health to the U.S.?
Greater educational attainment is consistently associated with lower mortality rates and better health behaviors in the U.S.: the well-known social gradient in health. However, recent research suggests that Mexican adults in the U.S. have weak or nonexistent gradients, in contrast to steep gradients for non-Hispanic whites. Healthy migrant and acculturation hypotheses have not been persuasive in explaining this finding. We propose a third hypothesis: Could the relative weakness of social gradients in health observed among Mexican-origin adults in the U.S. be explained simply by weaker gradients in the sending population? We test this “imported gradients” hypothesis with data from two large nationally representative data sets: the U.S. National Health Interview Survey and the Mexican National Health Survey. We compare the gradients in smoking and obesity for recently-arrived Mexican immigrants in the U.S. to gradients in high-migration regions of Mexico. Results generally support the im
