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Final paper from SOC602: Ethnoracial Disparities in Health (Winter 2024) taught by Dr. Harvey Nicholson Jr at the University of Toronto.
Abstract
Canadian immigrant health disparities are often understood with race or admission class as an axis of differentiation, but investigating disaggregated ethnic disparities allows for a nuanced understanding of diverse immigrant healthcare experiences. In addition, while South Asians are often lumped together as a monolithic group in Canadian health research, it is worthwhile to disaggregate South Asian immigrants by national group because their transnational contexts are diverse. Thus, this paper investigated varying South Asian immigrant (percentage of Indian, Sri Lankan, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi immigrants by census tract) spatial access to healthcare in Scarborough, Ontario using a spatial lag regression model. In the analysis, socioeconomic variables (median household income, percentage of population with a Bachelor’s degree or higher, percentage of economic immigrants, and percentage of family immigrants by census tract) were controlled. I found that Indian immigrants were the only South Asian immigrant national group that had a meaningful relationship with health service access when controlling for socioeconomic factors. The positive relationship between Indian immigrants and spatial healthcare access suggests the presence of residual political factors where Indian immigrants have more political influence than other South Asian immigrants in Scarborough. Political economy frameworks theorize that this may be due to increased political participation and social
cohesion. These findings motivate population health initiatives to address disparities amongst seemingly monolithic national groups, especially in multicultural geographies.
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