The Fertility of Foreign Immigrants after Their Arrival: The Italian Case

Eleonora Mussino, Università di Roma
Salvatore Strozza, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II

This work presents an analysis of the reproductive behavior of foreign women with particular attention to those that migrated to Italy. Migrant fertility influences the period fertility rate and by using a micro and macro approach, this study shows that the effect varies by country of origin. This demonstrates that the contribution of migrant fertility is complex and that foreigners do not always have high fertility. The originality of this work is also the use of a longitudinal approach to Italian administrative data on births (Survey on Live Births between 2003 and 2006) and migration (resident permit registers of 2003) by implementing deterministic and probabilistic record linkage procedures. Studying the risk of having a the first child in Italy for the main citizenships, Albanians, Moroccans and Romanians, this work confirms that the three different groups have strong differences in the fertility pattern also when we control by socio-demographic factors.