Immigration, Working Conditions, and Health

This paper studies the effects of immigration on health. We combine information on individual characteristics from the German Socio-Economic Panel with detailed local labor market characteristics for the period 1984 to 2010. We exploit the longitudinal component of the data to analyze how immigration affects the health of both immigrants and natives over time. Immigrants are shown to be healthier than natives upon their arrival ("healthy immigrant effect"), but their health deteriorates over time spent in Germany. We show that the convergence in health is heterogeneous across immigrants and faster among those working in more physically demanding jobs. Immigrants are significantly more likely to work in these types of jobs and to be exposed to job-related health risks for longer periods. In the light of these facts, we investigate whether changes in the spatial concentration of immigrants affect natives' and previous immigrants' health by changing the allocation of working condition in the resident population. Our results suggest that immigration reduces residents' likelihood to work in physically demanding jobs increasing the likelihood of reporting good health and decreasing the risk of work-related injury in the resident population. These effects are concentrated in blue-collar occupations and larger among previous cohort of immigrants.