Background: Within Europe, France stands out as a major country that lacks recent and reliable evidence on how infant mortality levels vary among the native-born children of immigrants compared with the native-born children of two parents born in France. Methods: We used a nationally representative socio-demographic panel consisting of 296 400 births and 980 infant deaths for the period 2008-17. Children of immigrants were defined as being born to at least one parent born abroad and their infant mortality was compared with that of children born to two parents born in France. We first calculated infant mortality rates per 1000 live births. Then, using multi-level logit models, we calculated odds ratios of infant mortality in a series of models adjusting progressively for parental origins (M1), core demographic factors (M2), father's socio-professional category (M3) and area-level urbanicity and deprivation score (M4). Results: We documented a substantial amount of excess infant mortality among those children born to at least one parent from Eastern Europe, Northern Africa, Western Africa, Other Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas, with variation among specific origin countries belonging to these groups. In most of these cases, the excess infant mortality levels persisted after adjusting for all individual-level and area-level factors. Conclusions: Our findings, which can directly inform national public health policy, reaffirm the persistence of longstanding inequality in infant mortality according to parental origins in France and add to a growing body of evidence documenting excess infant mortality among the children of immigrants in Europe.

Background: The migrant mortality advantage is generally interpreted as reflecting the selection of atypically healthy individuals from the country of origin followed by the wearing off of selection effects over time, a process theorised to be accelerated by progressive and negative acculturation in the host country. However, studies examining how migrant mortality evolves over duration of stay, which could provide insight into these two processes, are relatively scarce. Additionally, they have paid little attention to gender-specific patterns and the confounding effect of age. In this study, we analyze all-cause mortality according to duration of stay among male and female migrants in France, with a particular focus on the role of age in explaining duration of stay effects.

Methods: We use the Echantillon Demographique Permanent (Permanent Demographic Sample; EDP), France's largest socio-demographic panel and a representative 1% sample of its population. Mortality was followed-up from 2004 to 2014, and parametric survival models were fitted for males and females to study variation in all-cause mortality among migrants over duration of stay. Estimates were adjusted for age, duration of stay, year, education level and marital status. Duration of stay patterns were examined for both open-ended and fixed age groups.

Results: We observe a migrant mortality advantage, which is most pronounced among recent arrivals and converges towards the mortality level of natives with duration of stay. We show this pattern to be robust to the confounding effect of age and find the pattern to be consistent among males and females.

Conclusions: Our novel findings show an intrinsic pattern of convergence of migrant mortality towards native-born mortality over time spent in France, independent from the ages at which mortality is measured. The consistent pattern in both genders suggests that males and females experience the same processes associated with generating the migrant mortality advantage. These patterns adhere to the selection-acculturation hypothesis and raise serious concerns about the erosion of migrant health capital with increasing exposure to conditions in France.