MPIDR Working Paper

Childbearing patterns of foreign-born women in Sweden

Abstract

In this paper, we present an investigation of patterns in childbearing among foreign-born women in Sweden from the early 1960s and onwards. It is performed in a similar way as a previous study by the author who analyzed childbearing patterns of Swedish-born women in that country by applying event-history techniques to population-register data. We base our study on the longitudinal information on childbearing and migration of 446.000 women born abroad who had ever lived in Sweden before the end of 1999. We display period trends in fertility by birth order for some aggregated groups of foreign-born women and find that developments over time have been quite similar for Swedish- and foreign-born women but that there exist important differences in levels of childbearing intensities between women stemming from different countries. When we examine patterns in childbearing by time since migration to Sweden, we find that such differences in most cases are due to the fact that immigrants 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. (AUTHOR)