Infant Mortality of Asian Americans

Hui Liu, University of Texas at Austin
Parker Frisbie, University of Texas at Austin

The overall purpose of this paper is to examine the differences in infant morality among Asian Americans, with special attention given to the effect of infant death age. We use the National Center for Health Statistics linked birth/infant death files for 1995-2000 to examine infant mortality among four Asian American subgroups: Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos and Other Asian Americans. This study confirms the immigrant advantage in infant mortality among those subgroups. However, this advantage is not constant. All of those subgroups except Filipinos show a similar picture: the immigrant advantage in infant mortality appears under one day; then it disappears during the following four weeks before it reemerges. Although the immigrant advantage is evident for the whole first year for Filipinos, the overall magnitude of advantage is the same as the other subgroups. Our preliminary results also provide evidence for variations of infant mortality differences among those subgroups by death age.