Socioeconomic and health consequences of settlement in new destinations: A study of Asian immigrants in the United States.

摘要

In the context of geographic diversification of newly arrived immigrants, this dissertation research is a comparative study of the socioeconomic status, health status, and health care utilization of Asian immigrants in different types of destinations in the United States, especially in new destinations. This research focuses on the geographic distribution of those new Asian immigrants and investigates how the destination types affect their employment status, income, additional investment in the U.S. education, physical health, dietary change, mental health, and health care utilization.;This is mainly a quantitative study, using data from the U.S. census, ACS, and the New Immigrant Survey (NIS). Besides descriptive statistics I employ a variety of multivariate methods in my analyses, including logistic regression, OLS regression, and multinomial logistic regression. Asian immigrants in various types of settlement areas are found to differ significantly in their demographic characteristics, SES, health, and health care usage. After controlling for a series of socio-demographic, economic, migration-related variables, location still exerts great influence on Asian immigrants' socioeconomic and health outcomes.;This study provides substantial empirical findings on the socioeconomic and health assimilation of Asian immigrants in different types of settlement areas, especially non-traditional destinations. It tests the applicability of assimilation theory on new settlement patterns, and finds diverse assimilation patterns for various subgroups of Asian immigrants according to their different socioeconomic characteristics and types of settlement areas. Moreover, this study improves research methods of studying new destinations of immigrants to the U.S. by applying and comparing two typologies of Asian settlement areas.