Educational Selectivity and the Immigrant–Native Health Disparity

Selectivity is a key explanation for immigrant health advantage, yet existing evidence often conflates premigration selection with post-migration processes and bundles together multiple dimensions of selectivity. Because immigrants are selected on multiple premigration characteristics associated with health, identifying specific dimensions of selectivity is necessary to better understand immigrant health advantage. We evaluate educational selectivity by examining how predicted immigrant–native disparities change when contextual attainment—immigrants’ percentile rank within origin-country educational distributions—is introduced. Using pooled 2002–2018 National Health Interview Survey data linked to mortality follow-up through 2019, we analyze mortality, smoking, and activity limitation among first-generation Asian immigrants from China, India, and the Philippines and Latino immigrants from Mexico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. Accounting for contextual attainment reduces immigrant health advantages across all outcomes, with larger reductions under coethnic than White benchmarks, and these patterns persist across duration-of-residence strata. In origin-specific comparisons with same-origin U.S.-born coethnics, contextual attainment eliminates the coethnic mortality gap for Chinese immigrants and shifts the gap toward immigrant disadvantage for Cuban mortality and Dominican activity limitation. These findings show that educational selectivity captures a measurable component of broader selectivity effects and that reference-group choice is consequential for interpreting immigrant–native disparities.