The aim of this paper is to ascertain the existence of differences in self-perceived health and depression between immigrants and native-born populations aged  years and older living in Western and Northern European countries. We examine the effect of country of origin, length of time in the host country and citizenship on the health of adults, using data from the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). As the logistic regressions reveal, some immigrant groups are more likely to perceive worse self-rated health and to suffer from depression than nativeborn groups, even when demographic and socio-economic variables are taken into account. In particular, people born in Eastern Europe living in Germany, France and Sweden have the highest odds ratio of poor health with respect to natives. Nativity status, duration and citizenship clearly contribute towards explaining health differences which are shown to vary significantly across countries. Furthermore, the perception of poor health rises as the length of stay increases, although a non-linear pattern was found. Results indicate that greater efforts by policy makers are needed in order to improve the health of specific middle-aged and older groups of immigrants in Europe.

This paper suggests that health inequalities do not affect immigrant groups in equal measure and confirm the poorer and more steeply deteriorating health status of Eastern European immigrants.

The purpose of this study was to determine the differences between natives and immigrants in regard to transition probabilities among health states in self-rated health (SRH), depression, and activities of daily living for middle-aged and older adults in Europe. The Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement allows us to investigate how successfully the immigrants have aged from 2004 to 2011 compared to natives, according to country of origin and age at migration. We showed that some groups, such as Eastern European immigrants, have higher probabilities of health deterioration in terms of SRH. Moreover, those immigrants who arrived in the host country during adulthood experienced relatively fast health decline.

Height convergence across Italian regions during the second half of the twentieth century is a widely recognized fact. However, it has been suggested that this process was partly affected by the massive migratory flow of people from southern to northern Italy in the 1950s and 1960s, which greatly slowed the height growth rate in the receiving regions, since immigrants were on average shorter than the receiving northern population. The main aims of this study were to estimate the speed of height convergence of Italian military conscripts in the second half of the twentieth century, and to estimate the contribution of internal migration from the south to the north of Italy to height convergence. We hypothesized that migrants from southern Italy reduced height levels among northerners relative to what they would have been without considering migration. We used cohort data on Italian conscripts born in 1951 and 1980. Results indicate that internal migration may explain from 24 to 32.7 percent of height convergence, meaning that ignoring migration flows yields an overestimation of the height changes for conscripts living in the south of Italy.