Migrants mortality advantage: investigating the social individual determinants using classification trees

Jonathan Zufferey, Université de Genève

The migrant mortality advantage has been widely identified in Western countries. In Switzerland, it concerns the whole foreign population although migrants become more and more heterogeneous. There isn't probably only one explanation about the process which leads to a lower mortality rate among migrants. Therefore, the social determinants of mortality -- demographic, migratory and socioeconomic factors -- should not have the same impact among all individuals. Applying model-based recursive partitioning on a census cohort of the whole Swiss population followed between 2001 and 2008, we detect interactions between the social determinants of mortality in order to disentangle the paths to migrant longevity. In this paper, We will emphasis the differential impacts of social factors between migrants and natives, and among migrants. We will be able to assess the conjunction of factors which leads to vulnerability or, in the opposite, which brings high probability of survival.