RESEARCH ARTICLE
Are Immigrants at Increased Risk of Occupational Injury? A Literature Review
Simo Salminen*
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2011Volume: 4
First Page: 125
Last Page: 130
Publisher Id: TOERGJ-4-125
DOI: 10.2174/1875934301104010125
Article History:
Received Date: 01/09/2011Revision Received Date: 02/12/2011
Acceptance Date: 12/12/2011
Electronic publication date: 30/12/2011
Collection year: 2011
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The aim of this review is to examine whether immigrant workers have a higher occupational injury rate than native employees. We collected 72 studies from around the world. A calculation based on 31 of these studies shows that the risk of occupational injury for foreign-born workers is 2.13 times higher than that of native-born workers. In seven studies immigrants actually had a lower occupational injury rate. At highest, immigrant workers had ten times the injury rate of native workers, whereas in one USA study the occupational injury rate of immigrant workers was only half of that of American-born workers. However, three studies consistently showed that immigrant workers had a higher injury rate than the original population during their first five years at the workplace, but that after five years their rate decreased to below the level of native workers. The conclusion of this study is that immigrant workers have a worse work conditions than native workers.
