Residential segregation and the fertility of immigrants and their descendants

Abstract

Measures of community population composition, such as residential segregation, are important theoretical mechanisms that have the potential to explain differences in fertility between immigrants, their descendants, and destination natives. However, only a handful of studies explore these mechanisms, and most are limited by the fact that they carry out cross-sectional analysis.This study proposes a new approach, which focuses on community composition in childhood. It uses longitudinal census data and registered births in England and Wales to investigate the relationship between completed fertility and multiple measures of community composition, including residential segregation. The results show that the fertility of immigrants is closer to native fertility if they grow up in less segregated areas. This provides evidence in support of the childhood socialisation hypothesis. Furthermore, residential segregation explains some of the variation in completed fertility for second-generation women from Pakistan and Bangladesh, the only second-generation group to have significantly higher completed fertility than natives. This suggests one reason why the fertility of some South Asians in England and Wales may remain "culturally entrenched." All of these findings are consistent for different measures of community composition. They are also easier to interpret than the results of previous research because exposure is measured before childbearing has commenced, therefore avoiding many issues relating to selection, simultaneity, and conditioning on the future.

Declined Total Fertility Rate Among Immigrants and the Role of Newly Arrived Women in Norway

“…Fifth, residential segregation or immigrant density may influence immigrant women’s fertility (Lichter et al 2012 ; Wilson and Kuha 2017 ); if they live in less segregated areas, their fertility is often closer to the natives’. However, most municipalities in Norway had a higher density of foreign-born from most origin areas in 2017 than in 2000 (Statistics Norway 2019 ).…”

“…1 Examples include Haug et al (2002) and Sobotka (2008) for European overviews; Abbasi- Shavazi and McDonald (2000) and Carmichael et al (2003) for Australia; Zeman et al (2015) for Austria; Sobotka (2011) for Austria, Germany and Switzerland; Bélanger et al (2002), Woldemicael and Beaujot (2012) and Adserà and Ferrer (2010 for Canada; Puur et al (2017) for Russians in Estonia, Toulemon (2004) and Héran et al (2007) Kulu and Hannemann (2016), Robards and Berrington (2016) and Wilson and Kuha (2017) for UK; Blau and Francine (1992), Kahn (1994), Carter (2000), Lindstrom and Saucedo (2002), Frank and Heuveline (2005), Blau et al (2008), Parrado (2011), Lichter et al (2012), Livingston et al (2012), Choi (2014) and National Academies of Sciences (2015) for the USA; and Mora et al (2017) for Latinas in USA and Spain.…”

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

“…However, fertility levels were low among women of Indian and black Caribbean descent, whereas fertility was relatively high among women of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin. Recently, Wilson and Kuha (2018) also report high fertility among the descendants of Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants, which they attributed to the factors related to childhood socialisation in residentially segregated ethnic communities. Berrington (2018) shows that among the 1960-1979 cohorts who were born in the United Kingdom, 73% of Pakistani women and 85% of Bangladeshi women had become mothers by age 30, as compared with only 60% of white British women.…”

The Intergenerational Assimilation of Completed Fertility: Comparing the Convergence of Different Origin Groups

“…Since then, the literature has developed a number of hypotheses related specifically to the fertility of immigrants and their descendants (Goldberg 1959(Goldberg , 1960Goldscheider and Uhlenberg 1969;Ritchey 1975;Zarate and Zarate 1975;Goldstein 1981, 1983;Hervitz 1985;Coleman 1994;Forste and Tienda 1996;Abbasi-Shavazi and McDonald 2000;Kulu 2005). However, many of these hypotheses relate to the timing or "tempo" of birth rather than completed fertility (Wilson 2013). As such, hypotheses that make predictions relating to completed fertility convergence are childhood socialization, cultural entrenchment, and adaptation, each of which is defined next.…”