Point of Reference: A Multisited Exploration of African Migration and Fertility in France

A considerable literature explores whether the fertility of migrants from high-fertility contexts converges with that of women in lower fertility destinations. Nonetheless, much of this research compares migrants’ reproductive outcomes to those of native-born women in destination countries. Drawing on research emphasizing the importance of transnational perspectives, we standardize and integrate data collected in France (the destination) and in six high-fertility African countries (the senders). We show that African migrants in our sample had higher children ever born (CEB) than native French women but lower CEB than women in corresponding origin countries. These findings suggest that socialization into pronatalist norms is an incomplete explanation for migrant fertility in the first generation, an insight that is overlooked when analyzing destination settings only. Next, we conduct multivariate analyses that weight migrants’ background characteristics to resemble women in both origin and destination countries. Findings indicate that observed differences between African migrants in France and women in African origin countries help explain differences in CEB between the two groups, which supports selection. We also demonstrate that African migrants in France had delayed transitions into first, second, and third births and lower completed fertility compared to women in origin countries, thus disputing the disruption hypothesis. Finally, we show that observed differences between African migrants in France and native French women explain differences in CEB between the two groups, which supports adaptation. These multifaceted findings on selection, disruption, and adaptation would be obscured by analyzing destination settings only, thus validating a multisited approach to migrant fertility.

Post-Migration Fertility in Southern Europe: Romanian and Moroccan women in Italy and Spain

This paper seeks to analyse migrant women’s reproductive behaviour in two countries with the lowest fertility rates, namely, Italy and Spain. We assess differences in migrant fertility patterns according to country of origin by comparing the post-migration motherhood of Moroccan and Romanian women. We have used data from the “2007 National Immigrant Survey” (INE) and the ”2011-2012 Survey on Social Integration and Condition among Foreign Citizens” (ISTAT) to adopt an event-history approach to the factors that affect the birth of the first child after migration. Specifically, we focus on marital status upon arrival and on the number of previous children, controlling in turn for the women’s socioeconomic circumstances. The results show, firstly, that Moroccan women have a higher fertility rate than Romanians in both countries. Secondly, the risk of the first birth shortly after migration is higher among childless and married women, and this probability remain high even for women from Morocco with children. Thirdly a cross-country comparison reveals that the results related to childbearing patterns are similar.

Fertility Differences Between Migrants and Stayers in a Polygamous Context: Evidence from Senegal

This study takes a ‘country-of-origin’ or dissimilation perspective to compare the timing of births and completed fertility of international migrants and of those who stay at origin. In order to disentangle selection effects determining differential fertility behaviour of migrants, other mechanisms explaining migrant fertility (disruption, interrelation of events) are also examined. Furthermore, we take into consideration the prevalence of polygamy in Senegal to enhance our knowledge of migrant fertility in this specific context. For the empirical analysis, we use longitudinal data collected in the framework of the MAFE-Senegal project (Migrations between Africa and Europe), which includes retrospective life histories of non-migrants in Senegal and migrants in France, Italy and Spain. We estimate discrete time hazard models and Poisson regressions for male and female respondents separately to analyse the timing of first and higher-order births as well as completed fertility. The results show a strong disruptive effect of migration on childbearing probabilities for men and women, clearly related to the geographic separation of partners due to the out-migration of the man. Increased birth risks in the first year upon arrival could be observed for migrant women following their husbands to Europe, suggesting an interrelation of migration and fertility events. Regarding completed fertility, migrants have significantly fewer children by the age of 40 compared to their non-migrant counterparts, which among men is largely driven by a strong negative effect of polygamous migrants.

Incompatible with life: Embodied borders, migrant fertility, and the UK’s ‘hostile environment’

In this piece, I consider the uncomfortable and intimate intersection of bodies and borders through an autoethnographic account of encountering UK migration controls while losing a pregnancy. While this encounter was not representative of the disproportionate targeting of refused asylum seeker and undocumented migrants by these policies, I argue that migrant fertility has become a key lens through which the embodiment of the border is made material, and that the post-2012 deployment of a UK-wide set of policies generating a “Hostile Environment” for migrants demonstrates how the UK is embracing discomfort as a political strategy to deter migrants. Migrant fertility becomes perceived as an anticipatory threat to the body politic that must be continually pre-empted by the state. The restrictive policies of the UK’s hostile environment have exacerbated the perceived threat of fertile migrants, and that the threat posed by these migrants has become both racialized and medicalized, with multi-scalar, material consequences for migrants.

Visualising Immigrant Fertility -- Profiles of Childbearing and their Implications for Migration Research

Different measures of fertility have strengths and limitations when used to describe the fertility of immigrants, and no single measure captures every aspect of this complex phenomenon. This paper introduces a novel visual framework that shows life course profiles of immigrant childbearing in a multifaceted way. It develops the well-known cohort fertility curve—showing the average number of children ever born over the life course—and adds lines for immigrant women arriving at different ages, using their average number of children born on arrival as a starting point. These immigrant fertility profiles can illustrate a number of important aspects of childbearing simultaneously, including children born before arrival, fertility after arrival and completed fertility at the end of childbearing. In addition to showing numbers of children born (i.e. fertility quantum), the slopes of each profile indicate the tempo of fertility and how this changes by age and duration of residence. The fertility profiles of different immigrant groups can be plotted in the same graph, and can be compared and contrasted with non-immigrant groups—at origin as well as destination—through the augmentation of each visualisation. Using Nordic register data, we illustrate how these fertility profiles can be used to expand our knowledge of immigrant childbearing and to investigate various hypotheses of migrant fertility, giving a novel overview of the relationships between fertility measures such as period and quantum, before and after arrival.

Migrant and non-migrant fertility in Greece: Results based on the 2001 population census

This paper examines fertility patterns and differentials between migrant and non-migrant women in Greece using data from the 2001 census on the reported numbers of children ever-born alive by citizenship. Special tabulations produced by the National Statistical Service of Greece are analysed and presented here. The analysis focuses on Greek, Albanian and Bulgarian women born over 1950-1970. Noticeable differences are observed. Despite the fact that Bulgarian women tend to have their first births earlier, their fertility levels are the lowest. Albanian women exhibit the highest fertility while levels for native women are somewhere in between. Nevertheless, the gap observed among the ethnic groups tends, broadly, to narrow over successive cohorts.