​Research on migrant health mostly examines labor migrants with some attention paid to the trauma faced by refugees. Marriage migrants represent an understudied vulnerable population in the migration and health literature. Drawing on a Social Determinants of Health (SDH) approach, the authors use a large Korean national survey and stratified multivariate regressions to examine the link between migration processes and the self-rated health of Korea's three largest ethnic groups of marriage migrants: Korean-Chinese, Vietnamese, and Han Chinese.

Findings: The authors find that post-migration socioeconomic status and several social integration factors are associated with the health of marriage migrants of all three groups. Specifically, having more social relationships with Koreans is associated with good health among marriage migrants, while having more social relationships with co-ethnics is associated with worse health. Marriage migrants' perceived social status of their natal and marital families is a better predictor of their health than more objective measures such as their education attainment and that of their Korean husbands.