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Discrimination and Health of Male and Female Canadian Immigrant

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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show the importance of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, language, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, and disability on the self-rated health of male and female immigrants. Our data source is the Canadian General Social Survey (2004). Results show that immigrants report more discrimination than non-immigrants and female immigrants are more likely to report discrimination than male immigrants. Moreover, all types of perceived discrimination are inversely related to self-rated health for all groups, and the effect of perceived discrimination on poor health is stronger particularly for female than male immigrants. For most types of discrimination, female immigrants reported 1.1 to 2.5 times more health problems due to perceived discrimination than male immigrants. These ratios increased to 1.5 to 3.8 times in multivariate analyses that take into account the socio-demographic and socio-economic variables.

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Notes

  1. The health of urban residents was not significantly different than non-urban residents. We also created a variable which accounted for percent of visible minorities within urban and non-urban areas of each province. This variable was not significantly related to health.

  2. Inclusion of income without imputation did not alter the results for the total population. However, among immigrants, inclusion of income without imputation resulted in a slight increase for income effect, a non-significant married effect and significant effect for all cohorts of immigrants compared to those born in Canada. Immigrants’ poor health continually increased the longer they have been in Canada.

  3. All nine female minority immigrants are urban residents, have at least a college degree and immigrated to Canada after 1970s.

  4. Among immigrants in this survey, 64% of females stated that religious or spiritual beliefs are very important to them compared to 52% for males. Similarly 16% of females stated that they do not have any religious denomination compared to 21% for males.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, N9B 3p4, Canada

    Reza Nakhaie

  2. Department of Sociology, MacMaster University, Hamilton, ON, KTH 627, Canada

    Rochelle Wijesingha

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  1. Reza Nakhaie
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  2. Rochelle Wijesingha
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Correspondence to Reza Nakhaie.

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Nakhaie, R., Wijesingha, R. Discrimination and Health of Male and Female Canadian Immigrant. Int. Migration & Integration 16, 1255–1272 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-014-0392-y

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