Rising Black life expectancy in an era of increased immigration.

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Learn more: PMC Disclaimer | PMC Copyright Notice Am J Epidemiol . 2025 Dec 11;195(6):1537–1545. doi: 10.1093/aje/kwaf273 Rising Black life expectancy in an era of increased immigration Arun S Hendi 1, ✉ , Veronica Clevenstine 2 Author information Article notes Copyright and License information 1 Office of Population Research, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, United States 2 Office of Population Research, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, United States ✉ Corresponding author: Arun S. Hendi, Office of Population Research, Princeton University, 257 Wallace Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544 ( arun.hendi@princeton.edu ) Received 2025 Jun 6; Revised 2025 Nov 2; Accepted 2025 Nov 30; Collection date 2026 Jun. © The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact reprints@oup.com for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact journals.permissions@oup.com. PMC Copyright notice PMCID: PMC13231865  PMID: 41371986 Abstract Though American mortality conditions have deteriorated in recent years, one bright spot has been Black life expectancy. Between 1994 and 2019, Black life expectancy rose by 5 years for women and 7 years for men, with most of these gains attributed to improving social and economic conditions for Black Americans. Over this same period, immigration also increased, with immigrants and their children now making up 22% of the Black population. This study shows that rising immigration is directly responsible for nearly 15% of the improvement in Black life expectancy. In 2019, immigrants added 1.5 years to overall Black life expectancy for men and 1.0 years for women. At the working ages, immigration reduces mortality by 15% and is projected to reduce overall Black mortality by 30% in the coming decades. During the COVID-19 pandemic, life expectancy for the US-born Black population with US-born parents fell by 3 years, but the foreign-born Black population experienced a 7-year drop, among the largest year-over-year declines for any major population subgroup. The story about rising Black life expectancy is thus more complicated—there has been a very real story of racial progress, but that story is overinflated when not considering the role of immigration. Keywords: life expectancy, mortality, immigration, inequality, race Introduction The tremendous increase in Black life expectancy over the past 3 decades has been hailed as a major victory for both public health efforts and racial progress in America. In the early 1990s, Black American men and women could expect to live 8 and 5 years fewer, respectively, than their White counterparts. 1 These racial gaps were so large that they exceeded all known socioeconomic inequalities and cross-national differences in life expectancy across high-income countries during that period. By the early 2010s, those gaps had been cut in half, with the increases in Black life expectancy linked in part to improvements for Black Americans in living standards, increased educational attainment, reductions in smoking-attributable mortality, improvements in safety and reductions in violent deaths, increased access to health care, and declining racial residential segregation. 2-11 Within the span of just 25 years, a problem that had seemed entirely intractable now seemed like it could be solved, or at the very least that things were moving in the right direction. During this same period when Black Americans were experiencing improvements in both social and economic conditions and rapid improvements in life expectancy, another trend was occurring seemingly in parallel: an increase in Black immigration. Black immigrants from the Caribbean and the African continent were arriving in growing numbers, building families, and becoming an increasing share of the total Black population in the United States. 12 Recent Black immigrants and their descendants differ in key ways from the African American population, who largely descend from slaves and free people whose families have been in the country for centuries and who have long been sorted into the American system of racial stratification. The immigrant group includes migrants arriving from the Caribbean, many of whom descend from enslaved people who were brought to the Western Hemisphere, but also a growing number from the African continent. Both immigrant origin groups are positively selected along a number of dimensions that have led them to have fundamentally different outcomes from the African American population. For example, Black immigrants and their children tend to be more educated, have higher household incomes, and have lower rates of poverty. 12 , 13 Another important outcome that is differentiated by nativity is mortality. Most immigrant populations tend to be healthier than their US-born counterparts. 14-17 Black immigrants have been shown to have lower rates of hypertension, obesity, diabetes, and childhood asthma and activity limitations relative to not just the US-born Black population, but the total US-born population as well. 18-21 This health advantage extends to mortality. 22 While improvements in Black life expectancy have been interpreted as a story of progress in reducing racial inequality, an increasing contribution of immigration to mortality could complicate the story. 23 , 24 In other words, in addition to declining racial inequality, changes in the composition of the Black population may be driving the narrowing of racial disparities in mortality. While we know that Black immigrant life expectancy was very high in past decades, 22 to the best of our knowledge, there has not been a clear assessment of the effect of rising migration on trends in overall Black life expectancy over the past 3 decades, and the potential for immigration to shape future trends in Black mortality has been underappreciated. This article thus examines how trends in Black immigration to the United States have shaped Black mortality and life expectancy between the early 1990s and present, the period of peak Black migration to the United States in the modern era. We produce estimates of mortality by nativity and demonstrate how rising Black immigration has led to changes in overall Black life expectancy, highlighting patterns by age and cause of death. Methods We use data on deaths from the Multiple Cause of Death (MCD) file provided by the National Center for Health Statistics, which compiles information from death certificates for every individual who dies in the United States. Our analysis focuses on the individual years ranging between 1994 and 2020 and is restricted to the resident U.S. population (ie, we exclude foreign tourists but include both documented and undocumented immigrants). We do not use currently available data from 2021 to 2023 because the coding of race in data files from 2021 forward is not comparable to the race coding used in 2020 and prior years. The MCD data includes information on the year of death, age at death, sex, race, Hispanic ethnicity, place of birth, and cause of death for each decedent. Of particular interest for this study is the quality of the reporting of nativity on the death certificate. Prior research has shown a high degree of validity for place of birth reporting on the death certificate, with death certificate nativity matching prior survey self-reports of place of birth at a rate of approximately 99.4%. 25 Unweighted sample counts matched to death certificate records in recent decades for indicate that racial classification ratios differ from 100% by only a few percentage points 26 and that these classification ratios are fairly consistent over time. 27 To the extent that they differ, they would tend to overstate Black deaths conditional on foreign-born nativity. This suggests that the death certificate nativity data for Black decedents is sufficient to produce estimates of acceptable quality and that are measured consistently over time. To compute age-specific death rates, we combine the MCD data with data on population counts by sex, race, ethnicity, nativity, and age. The population data comes from the 1990-2020 NCHS bridged-race population estimates, the 1990 and 2000 U.S. Censuses, the annual American Community Survey (ACS) waves for the individual years 2006 through 2020, and the annual March Current Population Survey (CPS) for the individual years 1990 through 2020. For the latter 3 population datasets, we use the IPUMS version of the data files. 28 , 29 The decennial Census and the ACS are used to construct the percent foreign-born for each year by age, sex, race, and ethnicity. We do not report estimates for 2001-2005 since the ACS does not become representative of the total US population until 2006, but the estimates for those years are consistent with a linear trend connecting 2000 and 2006 (estimates available on request). The March CPS is used to compute the proportion of each race/ethnicity group that is US-born with foreign-born parents (ie, second generation) by age, sex, and year. The CPS is the only large-scale, nationally representative survey that includes measurement of parents’ birth places. Mortality estimates for US-born people with US-born parents are restricted to 1994 forwards because that is the first year that information on the birthplace of one’s parents is available in the CPS. The foreign-born and second generation percentages are combined with the NCHS population counts to produce a time-series of population counts by age, sex, race, ethnicity, and nativity. We conduct a number of robustness checks ( Appendix A, Figures S1 - S8 , and Tables S1 - S3 ) that show that our findings are unlikely to be driven by mortality measurement errors, changes in salmon bias, misclassification of nativity on the death certificate, very low adolescent foreign-born mortality, or unusual age patterns of mortality. Analytic approach The mortality rate for the Black population at ages to can be written as the weighted sum of the age-specific mortality rates for the subpopulations who are foreign-born (FB), second-generation (SG), and US-born with US-born parents (USBP): (1) where indicates the proportion of the Black population aged to who are in nativity group , is the death rate at ages to for the Black population in nativity group , and is the overall Black mortality rate at ages to . The second-generation population consists of individuals born in the United States with at least one foreign-born parent, so the 3 nativity groups are mutually exclusive and exhaustive. By construction, for each age group. We wish to compute life expectancy for the Black population net of the direct effects of the foreign-born and the second-generation—ie, we want to retrieve , which we cannot directly observe. We can directly measure , , , , and using death certificate data for the total and foreign-born Black populations from the MCD file and data on the populations who are foreign-born, second-generation, and US-born with US-born parents from the decennial U.S. Censuses, annual ACS files, and annual March CPS files. The unknowns are and . We estimate , leaving one unknown— , the quantity we wish to compute—that can be solved for. We first define a parameter, , as follows: . Using , we can rewrite the above equation as follows: thus allowing us to estimate using observed values and a single parameter. We borrow values from the Hispanic and non-Hispanic Asian populations since they cannot be directly observed for the Black population. We operate under the assumption that values for the Black population are in the range of the values for the Hispanic and non-Hispanic Asian populations. We use the fact that US-born Hispanics and non-Hispanic Asians are largely second-generation to form the ratio using the race/ethnicity-specific US-born populations in the numerator. Estimates of USBP Black mortality do not vary significantly based on the choice of Hispanic versus non-Hispanic Asian values, and the estimates yield the same qualitative story even if we adjust the values up or down by a 60% perturbation factor (see Figures S1 - S3 and Tables S1 , S2 ). Even if we were to assume zero effect of the second generation on total Black mortality, we would still get estimates within the same ballpark, indicating that the results and interpretation of results are robust to assumptions about values. After computing the total, foreign-born, and USBP Black mortality rates by age (age groups 0, 1-4, 5-9, 10-14, …, 80-84, 85+ years), sex (male and female), and year (individual years between 1994 and 2020), we construct life tables to estimate period life expectancy at age 1. This life expectancy measure can be interpreted as the number of additional years of life a one-year-old can expect to live if he or she is subject for the remainder of his or her life to the period mortality conditions for the current year. We focus on life expectancy at age 1 instead of life expectancy at birth because the latter measure would require us to observe foreign-born infant mortality. The overwhelming majority of infant deaths occur within the first 7 days following birth. For one to observe a foreign-born infant death in this period, the infant would need to have been born abroad, brought to the United States almost immediately, and then die in the US. This sequence of events is extraordinarily unlikely, making it difficult to construct an infant mortality measure for immigrants that is comparable to the same measure for the US-born population. By using life expectancy at age 1, we thus avoid the issues of interpretation relating to life expectancy at birth for the foreign-born. The period life expectancy at age 1 is not meant as a projection, forecast, or claim about what any given birth cohort will experience in their lives. Instead, it is meant as a summary measure of period mortality conditions, consistent with the broader literature on life expectancy trends. Its advantages over other measures, like an age-standardized death rate, include that it is presented in units that are easily interpreted by both experts and scientists without expertise in mortality and that it is not subject to the use of a potentially arbitrary age standard. We compute the contribution of various causes of death to the nativity gap in life expectancy at age 1 using Arriaga’s decomposition. 30 , 31 Cause of death categories are given in Table S4 . The categories are mutually exclusive and exhaustive and the cause-specific contributions sum to the total nativity gap in life expectancy at age 1. We estimate Arriaga’s decomposition separately by sex for the years 1990, 2019, and 2020, and also compute the contribution of each cause to the change in life expectancy between 1990 and 2019 as well as the change from 2019 to 2020. Results Age patterns of mortality Figure 1 consists of 4 panels, with the left 2 panels graphing the age pattern of the US-born to foreign-born mortality ratio and the right panels graphing the ratio of USBP mortality to overall Black mortality. Each graph contains 2 lines, representing 1994 and 2019. Figure 1. Open in a new tab Ratio of US-born (USB) to foreign-born (FB) mortality (left) and ratio of US-born with US-born parents (USBP) to total mortality (right), Black population, 1994 and 2019. The dotted line at y = 1.0 indicates the region of equality between the 2 types of mortality rates. In the left 2 panels, representing the migrant mortality advantage, the ratios are always above 1.0. They are particularly high at the early to middle adult ages (20-49 years), after which they tend to decline with age. The ratios have increased significantly over time, and the rise is especially acute at the working ages (15-64 years). For working age men, the average ratio was 2.0 in 1994, rising to 2.8 in 2019. For working age women, the ratios increased from 2.0 to 2.6. The highest ratios we observe are approximately 3.5, occurring in the late 20s for women and the late 40s for men in 2019. The right set of panels graph the ratios of USBP mortality to total mortality for men and women. The difference between the ratio and 1.0 captures how much immigration lowers total Black mortality. Because migrants tend to have lower mortality than the USBP population, this ratio is always greater than 1.0. These ratios have increased significantly over time. In 1994, the male USBP population’s mortality at the working ages was on average 4% higher than for the Black male population as a whole. By 2019, the USBP population had mortality that was 15% higher than the Black population as a whole, indicating an increasing contribution of immigration to lowering total Black mortality. For women, the corresponding estimates were 4% in 1994 and 13% in 2019, again suggesting a rising contribution of immigration to lowering Black mortality. Immigration tends to have the largest impacts on overall Black mortality at ages 15-49 for both men and women. This reflects both the substantial migrant mortality advantage and the greater representation of immigrants at those ages. Contribution of immigration to life expectancy Figure 2 shows that for Black men in 2019, total life expectancy was approximately 72.5 years, foreign-born (FB) life expectancy was 82.3 years, and life expectancy for the USBP population was 71.0 years. For Black women in 2019, total life expectancy was 79.3 years, foreign-born life expectancy was 87.3 years, and USBP life expectancy was 78.3 years. By any standard, the foreign-born life expectancies are exceptionally high and the USBP life expectancies are alarmingly low. Black FB life expectancy by sex exceeds that of Swiss men (81.2 years) and Japanese women (86.6 years), the respective world leaders in longevity for national populations. 32 Black USBP male life expectancy is lower than the life expectancies of Bangladesh, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, and only slightly higher than life expectancy in Iraq, while USBP female life expectancy is exceeded by those of Peru, Tunisia, and Bulgaria. 33 In 2019, foreign-born life expectancy was approximately 10 years higher than total life expectancy and 11.3 years higher than for the male USBP population. For women, the corresponding differences are 8 and 9 years, respectively. The FB-Total and FB-USBP gaps have grown over time and were 1.2 to 2.5 years smaller in the mid-1990s, indicating that not only did the foreign-born Black population have a mortality advantage, but that their advantage grew significantly in the 25 years covered by the estimates. While this difference is consistent with other studies indicating a migrant mortality advantage, the magnitude of the gap is significantly larger than for other racial and ethnic subpopulations, due in part to the elevated levels of US-born Black mortality. 34 Figure 2. Open in a new tab Trends in Black life expectancy by nativity (left) and the contribution of immigration to Black life expectancy by sex (right), 1990-2020. The contribution of immigration to total life expectancy is the amount by which the lower mortality rates of recent immigrants and their children directly increase national Black life expectancy. Estimates for 2001-2005 are not shown and are replaced by dotted lines (actual estimates are very close to the dotted lines). Though Black immigrants tend to have a large mortality advantage in general, their life expectancies were far more adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Between 2019 and 2020, foreign-born life expectancy declined by 7.4 and 6.7 years for men and women, respectively, while USBP life expectancy declined by 3.7 and 2.9 years. These declines for the Black foreign-born population are among the largest year-over-year losses in life expectancy ever observed for any major population subgroup in the United States. The right 2 panels of Figure 2 show the contribution of immigration to total Black life expectancy for each year from 1994 to 2020. In 1994, immigration increased Black life expectancy by 0.50 years for men and 0.40 years for women. That contribution increased tremendously over time, so that by 2019, immigration increased Black life expectancy by 1.5 years for men and 1.0 years for women. The larger contribution for men is in part due to the substantial migrant mortality advantage for men at the younger adult ages (20-49 years), where external causes of death like homicide and drug overdose tend to drive mortality patterns. The dramatic increase in the contribution of immigration is due to both the widening mortality gap between the foreign-born and USBP groups and to the increasing share of the Black population born abroad or with foreign-born parentage. Cause of death contributions The contributions of 21 mutually exclusive and exhaustive causes of death to the foreign-born-US-born life expectancy gap are shown in Table 1 . The table includes contributions to the gap in 1990, 2019, and 2020, as well as contributions of each cause to the change over time between 1990-2019 and 2019-2020. For both men and women, immigrants maintained an advantage over the native-born across nearly all causes of death (with the exception of COVID-19 in 2020 and, for women, perinatal/congenital deaths in 1990). Thus, the migrant mortality advantage is fairly universal and not concentrated only among, for example, external causes like homicide. Among men, the largest contributors to the gap in 1990 were circulatory diseases (31%), lung cancer (12%), other cancers (10%), infectious diseases (largely HIV/AIDS, 6%), digestive and genitourinary diseases (5%), alcohol-related causes (5%), other external causes (5%), and homicide (4%). In 2019, the biggest contributors to the nativity gap were circulatory diseases (29%), homicide (10%), drug overdose (8%), digestive and genitourinary diseases (6%), respiratory diseases (6%), other cancers (6%), and lung cancer (6%). The change over time columns shows how much each cause of death contributed to the widening of the gap (with negative values indicating that a cause produced narrowing in the gap). Between 1990 and 2019, the largest contributors to the widening of the gap were homicide (28%), drug overdose (27%), circulatory diseases (24%), respiratory diseases (12%), digestive and genitourinary diseases (10%), diabetes (6%), mental disorders (6%), and Alzheimer’s disease (6%). Lung cancer, alcohol-related deaths, infectious diseases, other cancers, and other external causes contributed to a narrowing of the gap. Table 1. Contributions of causes of death to the nativity gap in life expectancy at age 1. Male Female Contributions to life exp. gap Change over time Contributions to life exp. gap Change over time Cause of death 1990 2019 2020 2019-1990 2020-2019 Cause of death 1990 2019 2020 2019- 1990 2020- 2019 Homicide 0.33 1.12 1.29 0.79 0.17 Respiratory 0.24 0.70 0.41 0.46 −0.28 Drug overdose 0.11 0.88 0.98 0.77 0.10 Alzheimer’s disease 0.01 0.45 0.17 0.43 −0.28 Circulatory 2.50 3.17 1.76 0.67 −1.41 Drug overdose 0.03 0.41 0.47 0.38 0.07 Respiratory 0.32 0.67 0.35 0.34 −0.32 Mental disorders 0.09 0.43 0.16 0.34 −0.27 Digestive/genitourinary 0.40 0.69 0.38 0.29 −0.30 Circulatory 2.22 2.53 1.28 0.31 −1.26 All other 0.32 0.52 0.36 0.20 −0.16 All other 0.37 0.67 0.40 0.30 −0.27 Diabetes 0.19 0.37 0.26 0.18 −0.11 Digestive/genitourinary 0.49 0.71 0.47 0.22 −0.24 Mental disorders 0.08 0.24 0.10 0.16 −0.14 Nervous system 0.13 0.28 0.21 0.15 −0.07 Alzheimer’s disease 0.01 0.17 0.05 0.16 −0.12 Flu/pneumonia 0.06 0.15 0.07 0.09 −0.09 Screenable cancers 0.13 0.27 0.10 0.15 −0.17 Infectious 0.23 0.30 0.18 0.08 −0.13 Suicide 0.04 0.16 0.13 0.12 −0.03 Lung cancer 0.45 0.53 0.28 0.08 −0.25 Nervous system 0.15 0.25 0.12 0.09 −0.12 Other cancers 0.41 0.47 0.06 0.06 −0.41 Motor vehicle accidents 0.27 0.32 0.40 0.05 0.08 Diabetes 0.29 0.33 0.18 0.04 −0.15 Perinatal/congenital 0.02 0.04 0.05 0.02 0.01 Motor vehicle accidents 0.07 0.11 0.19 0.04 0.08 COVID-19 0.00 0.00 −0.45 0.00 −0.45 Other external 0.09 0.12 0.12 0.03 0.00 Flu/pneumonia 0.16 0.15 0.06 −0.01 −0.09 Suicide 0.01 0.04 0.03 0.03 −0.01 Other external 0.39 0.24 0.20 −0.15 −0.04 Perinatal/Congenital −0.01 0.01 0.02 0.02 0.01 Other cancers 0.82 0.64 0.33 −0.18 −0.30 COVID-19 0.00 0.00 −0.07 0.00 −0.07 Infectious 0.53 0.32 0.22 −0.20 −0.10 Homicide 0.22 0.18 0.20 −0.04 0.02 Alcohol related 0.40 0.18 0.12 −0.22 −0.06 Alcohol related 0.17 0.08 0.10 −0.08 0.02 Lung cancer 1.01 0.63 0.30 −0.38 −0.33 Screenable cancers 0.51 0.36 0.13 −0.15 −0.22 TOTAL 8.16 11.02 7.12 2.85 −3.90 6.06 8.85 5.05 2.79 −3.80 Open in a new tab All estimates are measured in years and cause of death contributions sum to the total gap in life expectancy at age 1. Causes are sorted in order of largest to smallest contribution to the change in life expectancy between 1990 and 2019. Among women, the largest contributors to the nativity gap in 1990 were circulatory diseases (37%), screenable cancers (8%), digestive and genitourinary diseases (8%), lung cancer (7%), other cancers (7%), diabetes (5%), and respiratory diseases (4%). In 2019, the largest contributors included circulatory diseases (29%), digestive and genitourinary diseases (8%), respiratory diseases (8%), lung cancer (6%), other cancers (5%), Alzheimer’s disease (5%), and mental disorders (5%). The largest contributors to the widening of the gap between 1990 and 2019 were respiratory diseases (16%), Alzheimer’s disease (15%), drug overdose (14%), mental disorders (12%), circulatory diseases (11%), digestive and genitourinary diseases (8%), and nervous system diseases (5%). Screenable cancers, alcohol-related deaths, and homicide contributed to a narrowing of the gap. Between 2019 and 2020, there was a sharp narrowing of the nativity gap, since the foreign-born appear to have been more affected by the pandemic than the native-born. COVID-19 coded deaths contributed relatively little to the nearly 4-year narrowing of the gap—0.45 years for men and 0.07 years for women. The remainder of the narrowing was largely due to circulatory diseases, lung cancer, respiratory diseases, mental disorders, digestive and genitourinary diseases, other cancers, screenable cancers, and Alzheimer’s disease (women only). Future trends In addition to the current and past impacts of immigration on Black mortality, we expect immigration to have large future impacts. Figure 3 shows that immigrants and their children comprise an increasing share of the total Black population, approaching 25% in 2024. If the proportions foreign-born and second generation continue to increase at their rate from the last decade, then in the 35 years following 2019, we would expect that approximately 23% of the Black population would be foreign-born and 17.5% would be second generation. Using equation 1 , we can incorporate these percentages with 2019 nativity-specific mortality rates to project what the ratio of USBP to overall Black mortality would be in the future. Figure 4 shows that in this scenario, USBP working age mortality rates would be on average 31% higher for men and 27% higher for women than the corresponding overall Black mortality rates, indicating that overall Black mortality rates may be even less representative of USBP Black mortality in the coming decades. Figure 3. Open in a new tab (A) Percent of the U.S. Black population born abroad or with foreign-born parents, 1994-2024, and (B) percent of the U.S. foreign-born Black population born in the Americas versus Africa, 2000-2022. Second generation refers to individuals born in the U.S. with foreign-born parents. The Americas category includes Canada, Mexico, South and Central America, and the Caribbean, excluding territories of the United States. Dotted lines indicate a linear trend line. Figure 4. Open in a new tab Ratio of age-specific mortality rates for the US-born with US-born parents to projected age-specific mortality rates for the total Black population by sex. The projection of mortality for the total Black population assumes that 23% of the Black population will be foreign-born and 17.5% will be second generation. Discussion In this study, we show how immigration has reshaped Black mortality in the United States over the past quarter century. While the contribution of international migration to overall Black mortality was negligible in the early 1990s, both the mortality advantage of the foreign-born and their share of the total Black population have grown tremendously since then. As a result, by 2019, immigrants actually increased overall Black life expectancy by 1.5 years for men and 1 year for women. Much of this advantage is concentrated at the working ages of 15-64 years. Black immigrants have managed to avoid some of the more adverse trends facing the US-born Black population, such as rising drug overdose mortality and slower declines in homicide, although they were more vulnerable to the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This may be related to a morbidity-mortality paradox among the foreign-born, where worse health at older ages leads to sharp increases in mortality during large-scale social disruptions. 35 , 36 In addition to documenting a migrant mortality advantage for the contemporary Black American population, these findings are also important for informing our understanding of racial inequality. Racial progress is not the same as narrowing racial disparities. Achieving racial progress—improving the social conditions, economic circumstances, and institutional environments that lead to actual reductions in Black mortality—is hard, 37 and interpreting improvement in race-specific variables as equivalent to attaining racial progress masks the fact that a significant part of that improvement is due to changing population composition. There has been real racial progress: deaths from lung cancer and HIV/AIDS, for example, have declined precipitously for the US-born Black population. At the same time, however, nearly 15% of the improvement in overall Black life expectancy is due to immigration. The equivalent calculations for the non-Hispanic White population indicate a negligible contribution of immigration to life expectancy trends (see Figure S9 ). To give a sense of the magnitude of the immigration effect, the last time American men as a whole had a life expectancy as low as that of Black men in 2019 was 1995. Removing the effect of immigration on Black male life expectancy sets that lag all the way back to 1983, so that US-born Black men with US-born parents in 2019 are lagging total US male life expectancy by nearly 4 decades. Making matters worse, Black male life expectancy actually declined by nearly 1 year between 2014 and 2019, even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Over the past 25 years, there has been a very real story of racial progress, but that story is overinflated when not considering the role of immigration. Mixing together the separate stories of racial progress and immigration can also harm Black immigrants, whose unprecedented declines in life expectancy during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic were larger than for any other major subpopulation in the United States. This decline was heretofore unobserved because Black immigrants are typically not analyzed separately from the US-born Black population. 34 , 38 These are not transient concerns, and they may in fact become even more important in future decades. Africa is the only major world region currently projected by the United Nations to grow significantly over the next century, 33 and both the share of Black population growth due to immigration and the African share of total Black immigration are on the rise in the US, with African migrants set to become the largest Black immigrant group by the end of this decade ( Figure 3 ). Evidence on health outcomes suggests that African immigrants may have even higher life expectancy than Black immigrants from the Caribbean. 18 , 20 , 39 As the African continent develops and its population grows, we may also expect immigration from Africa to the US to increase, likely driving an even larger impact on trends in US Black life expectancy and other measures of well-being. Moving forward, it will be incumbent on American statistical agencies to provide the data and the means to distinguish between migrant and non-migrant trends, and on researchers to differentiate between the 2 phenomena in order to accurately assess the state of racial progress. Supplementary Material Web_Material_kwaf273 web_material_kwaf273.zip (416.1KB, zip) Acknowledgments Thanks to the editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. Contributor Information Arun S Hendi, Office of Population Research, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, United States. 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Supplementary Materials Web_Material_kwaf273 web_material_kwaf273.zip (416.1KB, zip) Data Availability Statement All data is publicly available from the IPUMS database and the US Census Bureau, or, in the case of deaths data, available on request from the National Center for Health Statistics. Articles from American Journal of Epidemiology are provided here courtesy of Oxford University Press ACTIONS View on publisher site PDF (918.7 KB) Cite Collections Permalink RESOURCES Similar articles Cited by other articles Links to NCBI Databases Follow NCBI NCBI on X (formerly known as Twitter) NCBI on Facebook NCBI on LinkedIn NCBI on GitHub NCBI RSS feed Connect with NLM NLM on X (formerly known as Twitter) NLM on Facebook NLM on YouTube National Library of Medicine 8600 Rockville Pike Bethesda, MD 20894 Web Policies FOIA HHS Vulnerability Disclosure Help Accessibility Careers NLM NIH HHS USA.gov Back to Top

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