Race/ethnicity, nativity, and infant mortality in the United States

The overall purpose of this article is to examine population differences in the risk of infant mortality by race/ethnicity, with special attention giv en to the influence of nativity. Data are taken from the National Center fo r Health Statistics (NCHS) linked birth/ infant death files for 1989-91. Th ese files cover virtually the entire nation, provide highly reliable data f or relatively small racial/ethnic subpopulations, and have recently been up dated to include new variables of interest. Results show that there is wide variation in the risk of infant death across racial/ethnic groups, with in fants born to black women suffering the highest risks and infants of Japane se women experiencing the lowest risks. It is also clear that nativity has a crucial impact on racial/ethnic differentials in infant mortality. In fac t, the favorable infant survival rates of many racial/ethnic groups are lar gely attributable to a high percentage of births to immigrant women, who ar e characterized by overall lower infant mortality than native-born women. B oth the racial/ ethnic differentials in mortality and the effect of nativit y, in turn, are due to several sets of factors, the importance of which var ies by race/ethnicity. Models of infant mortality estimated separately by r ace/ethnicity also revealed that the direction of effects for mortality ris k factors tends to be the same across groups, although the magnitudes vary. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that general efforts to lower infant mort ality will have a beneficial impact for all groups.