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BackgroundDebates exist as to whether, as overall population health improves, the absolute and relative magnitude of income- and race/ethnicity-related health disparities necessarily increase—or derease. We accordingly decided to test the hypothesis that health inequities widen—or shrink—in a context of declining mortality rates, by examining annual US mortality data over a 42 year period.Methods and FindingsUsing US county mortality data from 1960–2002 and county median family income data from the 1960–2000 decennial censuses, we analyzed the rates of premature mortality (deaths among persons under age 65) and infant death (deaths among persons under age 1) by quintiles of county median family income weighted by county population size. Between 1960 and 2002, as US premature mortality and infant death rates declined in all county income quintiles, socioeconomic and racial/ethnic inequities in premature mortality and infant death (both relative and absolute) shrank between 1966 and 1980, especially for US populations of color; thereafter, the relative health inequities widened and the absolute differences barely changed in magnitude. Had all persons experienced the same yearly age-specific premature mortality rates as the white population living in the highest income quintile, between 1960 and 2002, 14% of the white premature deaths and 30% of the premature deaths among populations of color would not have occurred.ConclusionsThe observed trends refute arguments that health inequities inevitably widen—or shrink—as population health improves. Instead, the magnitude of health inequalities can fall or rise; it is our job to understand why.

Contemporary patterns of homeownership reflect the continuing racial and ethnic stratification that exists in nearly all areas of American society. Of particular interest, especially within the context of recent immigration legislation, are the homeownership experiences of Mexican immigrants in the United States. Copyright (c) 2007 Southwestern Social Science Association.

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Annual U.S.‐Mexico pecuniary remittances are estimated to have more than doubled recently to at least $10 billion ‐ augmenting interest among policymakers, financial institutions, and transnational migrant communities concerning how relatively poor expatriate Mexicans sustain such large transfers and the impact on immigrant integration in the United States. We employ the 2001 Los Angeles County Mexican Immigrant Residency Status Survey (LAC‐MIRSS) to investigate how individual characteristics and social capital traditionally associated with integration, neighborhood context, and various investments in the United States influenced remitting in 2000. Remitting is estimated to have been inversely related to conventional integration metrics and influenced by community context in both sending and receiving areas. Contrary to straight‐line assimilation theories and more consistent with a transnational or nonlinear perspective, however, remittances are also estimated to have been positively related to immigrant homeownership in Los Angeles County and negatively associated with having had public health insurance such as Medicaid.

"By analysing how unauthorized Mexicans compare with seven other ethno-racial groups in Los Angeles County, separately and collectively, by educational attainment and time spent in the U.S., we find that unauthorized Mexicans had relatively fewer years of formal education (either in the U.S. or in Mexico) and had been in the U.S. a relatively fewer number of years than in-migrants of other ethno-racial backgrounds in 1990. These findings are then used as proxies to compare the human capital endowments of different ethno-racial groups. We next estimate the number of unauthorized Mexicans by occupation, industry and class of worker, and compare these distributions with the total labour force and with the other ethno-racial groups in Los Angeles County.... Results show that amounts of human capital are positively related to the kinds of occupations filled." (SUMMARY IN FRE AND SPA)

Marcelli E. A. (2004) Unauthorized Mexican immigration, day labour and other lower-wage informal employment in California, Reg. Studies 38, 1-13. Consistent with the marginalization but not the globalization hypothesis, this paper finds that the level of lower-wage informal employment in California during the 1990s fell from 17% to 14% of the labour force; informal workers were more likely to be male, younger, non-white, foreign-born, and employed in the Personal Service and Agriculture sectors; and a Californian was more likely to work informally if residing in a relatively less populous, lower-income region with a relatively high rate of home ownership. Although welfare use had a positive effect on the probability of working informally in 1990, thereafter it did not.Immigration, Informal work, Day labour, Welfare, Immigration, Travail informel, Main-d'oeuvre journaliere, Bien-etre, Einwanderung, Informelle Tatigkeit, Tagelohnerarbeit, Wohlfahrt, Inmigracion, Trabajo informal, Trabajo diario, Proteccion social,

We estimate cross-sectional associations of neighborhood level disorder, socioeconomic characteristics and social capital with individual level systemic inflammation, measured as high C-reactive protein (CRP), using Boston Metropolitan Immigrant Health & Legal Status Survey (BM-IHLSS) data – a sample of relatively young, healthy foreign born Brazilian adults. Logistic regression analyses suggest high CRP is positively associated with neighborhood disorder and negatively related to neighborhood social capital. Although we find no significant associations between other neighborhood socioeconomic variables and high CRP; males, those who were born in an urban area and those who had been graduated from high school were less likely to have had high CRP. Unauthorized Brazilian adults, those who smoked cigarettes daily and those who had a higher body mass index were more likely to have had high CRP. Our findings suggest that investigating sociogeographic stressors and social support may be important for understanding physiological dysregulation even among relatively healthy U.S. sub populations.