Childbearing after migration: Fertility patterns of foreign-born women in Sweden

The present study provides an investigation of patterns in childbearing among foreign-born women in Sweden from the 1960s to the 1990s. Event-history techniques are applied to longitudinal population register data on childbearing and migration of 446,000 foreign-born women who had ever lived in Sweden before the end of 1999. Period trends in parity-specific fertility appear to be quite similar for Swedish- and foreign-born women, but important differences exist in levels of childbearing propensities between women from different countries of origin. Most immigrant groups tend to display higher levels of childbearing shortly after immigration. We conclude that migration and family building in many cases are interrelated processes and that it is always important to account for time since migration when fertility of immigrants is studied.