Immigrants' Mental Health Dilemma

Despite evidence of immigrants’ mental health advantage over the U.S.-born population, it remains unclear how this advantage evolves over the life course and the underlying mechanisms. Using 28 years of longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study (1992–2020), this study shows that immigrants report lower depression than natives in their 50s, but this advantage declines with age and reverses around the 70s, when immigrants exhibit higher depression. The pattern holds across ethnoracial and gender groups. Analyses of pre- and post-migration factors suggest that childhood environments—such as trauma, family structure, parental warmth, and financial conditions—play little role. Instead, vulnerability to joblessness and financial insecurity, discrimination, reduced social support, marital changes, and neighborhood alienation explain about 80% of immigrants’ steeper increase in depression. Notably, the erosion of immigrants’ mental health advantage appears unrelated to their declining physical health advantage, indicating distinct mechanisms behind these trajectories.