Immigrants Live Longer

According to this report, review of birth and death records conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) indicates that immigrants to the United States live longer than native born citizens. It's blamed on native Americans smoking, drinking, and eating more.

My take is skepticism. The review only encompassed the years 1986 through 1994, a fairly short time span to draw blanket conclusions, at a time when a chief political complaint in the country is the inability to identify foreigners among us. If one cannot identify an actual immigrant from an illegal alien, the record review has to be problematic. In other words, it seems the reviewer had the ability to pick and choose which records to include in the research. I don't get a warm confidence level that the results of the review are objectively reflective of anything other than the political proclivities of the researchers.