Visualising Immigrant Fertility -- Profiles of Childbearing and their Implications for Migration Research
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Visualising Immigrant Fertility Profiles of Childbearing and their Implications for Migration Research Marianne Tønnessen 1
& Ben
Wilson 2,3
# The Author(s) 2020
Abstract 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. Keywords Migration . Fertility . Immigrant fertility . Fertility measures . Demography
* Marianne Tønnessen [email protected]
1
Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research, Oslo Metropolitan University, P.O. Box 4, St. Olavs plass, NO-0130 Oslo, Norway
2
Department of Sociology, Stockholm University, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden
3
Department of Methodology, London School of Economics, Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE, UK
Tønnessen M., Wilson B.
Introduction The fertility of immigrants and their descendants has received considerable attention over the last few decades (Kulu et al. 2019), not least because levels of immigration have risen in many countries, especially in most high-income European destinations (Eurostat 2019a). This trend has led to an increased interest in many aspects of immigrant’s lives, including their fertility, which we define here as childbearing behaviour over the reproductive life course. The childbearing of immigrants has long been of interest to academics—in particular demographers—partly due to the impact of immigration on population size and population composition (Haug et al. 2002; Jonsson and Rendall 2004; Sobotka 2008). Researchers have been interested in the determinants of immigrant fertility, including the impact that destinations have on the childbearing of immigrants after arrival (Kulu and
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