The Healthy Immigrant Effect (HIE) in the UK.

Sammanfattning: The so-called “Healthy Immigrant Effect” (HIE) is based on two complementary hypotheses: i) immigrants who recently arrived to a new country present a better health than the native-born population with similar socio-demographic characteristics; ii) immigrant´s health deteriorates faster than that of the native-born and converges towards native-born levels with the years lived in the host country. This phenomenon has been widely studied for working immigrants in countries who have traditionally received large flows of labour migration as Australia, Canada and the US. The aim of this paper is to study the possible existence of this HIE in the UK, a country which has recently experienced large figures of net labour immigration. For doing so, I use the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Survey (UKHLS) 2009-2013. With this dataset I find that immigrants working in the UK, both females and males, report a better health status than their native counterparts, and that these differences cannot be entirely explained by observable characteristics. The only group of immigrants who does not show a significantly better self-reported health than that of the native-born population was immigrants born in Developing Asia. In addition, the health distribution of immigrants converges towards that of the native-born workers during the period of analysis. This was mainly led by a faster deterioration in the health of immigrants coming from developing countries, in particular females who recently arrived to the UK.