Motherhood of foreign women in Lombardy

A decade of life-course research on fertility of immigrants and their descendants in Europe

“…Women who moved for work purposes had significantly lower fertility levels during their first years in Spain or Italy in comparison to other immigrant women. Similar patterns were also reported by Mussino et al (2015) in their study on fertility of immigrants in the Lombardy region of Italy. A study by Persson and Hoem (2014) on Sweden is another good example demonstrating significant fertility differences between marriage-related migrants and other migrants.…”

The fertility of recent migrants to England and Wales

“…We are mindful of the potential link between pregnancy and the likelihood of registration (Robards, Berrington, and Hinde 2013). We follow past research (e.g., Mussino et al 2015) by selecting migrants to the UK and calculating pre-and post-migration fertility rates. This approach risks anticipatory analysis where pre-migration fertility may be low due to occurrence/timing of an event within another decision-making framework and timescale (the decision to migrate) (Hoem 2014).…”

The Transnational Making of Population: Migration, Marriage and Fertility Between Morocco and Italy

“…Indeed, a closer look at its composition reveals numbers to be quite uneven (Table 2), with African women and especially those from northern African having almost twice as many children as European women, and numbers much higher than Latinas and Asian women (Giannantoni and Gabbrielli 2015;Giannantoni et al 2018). Such heterogeneity has been explained in reference to the diverse migratory patterns enacted by migrant women in Italy, comprising both work and family trajectories (Ortensi 2015;Mussino et al 2015;Mussino and Strozza 2012a, b). Specifically, these differences stem from the peculiarity of domestic work (Ambrosini 2013): called on to provide a wide range of personal care services, indeed, foreign female workers are required to limit or even completely exclude the possibility of having their own families in Italy (Bonizzoni 2015a;Decimo 2015).…”

“…At the same time, women from other countries appear to have many more opportunities to raise children in Italy, as well as, on the other side, fewer possibilities to access the labour market. Women from northern and sub-Saharan Africa as well as the Balkans use family reunification to enact migratory paths aimed at setting up households and giving rise to their reproductive futures here in the host country (Table 2), so much so that migration and fertility often constitute interrelated events (Ortensi 2015;Mussino and Strozza 2012a, b;Mussino et al 2015).…”

“…Moroccan households constitute a significant research field at this end: not only do they represent the main non-European component in the country in terms of numbers, births and fertility rates (Tables 2, 3 and 4), but Moroccan women also display a marked tendency to bear children after migration. As a result, mobility and reproduction effectively constitute intertwined events in their life courses (Mussino and Strozza 2012a, b;Mussino et al 2015). In the following pages, I explore how Moroccan women are able to overcome the detrimental effects of displacement, to set up their households in Italy and to have children in migration.…”