Education and the Sustainability of Immigrant Health: Canadian Evidence

Abstract

Using data from the three waves of the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada, this study explores the link between health and education among recently arrived immigrants to Canada. The empirical evidence, derived from the application of ordered and bivariate probit regressions (with the use of instruments to address the endogeneity question), suggests that education is positively and significantly related to the self-reported health status of newly arrived immigrants. The probability of reporting excellent, very good, or good health was 37 percent higher for immigrants who had more than high school education than for those with only high school education or less. This study goes one step further to investigate the role of education in changes in health status in the first four years after arrival. In that regard, the study finds that those with post-secondary education were more likely to maintain the state of health reported on entry if it was good, very good, or excellent and more likely to improve it if it was poor or fair. In short, education was found to play a role in both amplifying the healthy immigrant effect and in dampening the attenuation of that effect.