Birthweight advantage
of Black immigrants: lost in
a generation.
Birthweight can be a predictor of a range of health and socioeconomic outcomes, and in the United States Black women are known to have the highest prevalence of low birthweight babies of all racial groups. Evidence also suggests that immigrant women who give birth in the US have babies with higher weights than women born in the US.
Yet new research suggests that this birthweight advantage of immigrants extends beyond a single generation… for some races.
Andrasfay & Goldman (2020) looked at 1971-2015 Florida birth records to assess intergenerational changes in birthweight. They found that Black immigrants typically have larger babies than US-born Black women but that, in contrast to Hispanic immigrants, this ‘healthy immigrant’ effect is lost within a generation.
Whilst the study did not specifically investigate reasons for this difference, the authors suggest that a “lifetime exposure to discrimination and socioeconomic inequality is associated with adverse health outcomes for Black women.”
Original research: Andrasfay & Goldman (2020) Intergenerational change in birthweight: effects of foreign-born status and race/ethnicity, Epidemiology, https://doi.org/10.1097/EDE.0000000000001217