The impact of the post war migration flows on disparities in susceptibility to death from age 50 on: the case of Turin in Italy

Regional compositional changes due to migration can modify the distribution of health outcomes, death rates, life style factors and socioeconomic characteristics. The majority of studies on internal or short distances migrations focused on the effect of migration on geographical health and mortality variation. By contrast there is still little empirical evidence on the effect of internal migrations on the patterns of socioeconomic inequality in mortality.
The aim of this paper is to investigate whether the internal post war migration in Italy affected the pattern of mortality inequality by socioeconomic status, from age 50 on, in one of the main areas of destination, the north-western industrial city of Turin, where many individuals sought jobs in the car factories.
We hypothesize that the interplay of the healthy migrant effect and faster health selection due to exposure to higher mortality risk might have homogenized the men population, thus reducing differences in susceptibility to death. We also hypothesize that the process had an impact also reducing the differences in mortality risk by education level and that these processes must have affected more strongly men than women because because they were more passive actors in the migratory decisions and less heavily involved in the industrialization process.