Project Goals
Goal 1: Investigate whether international migration is associated with fertility change
Exploring whether international migration is associated with fertility change requires comparing migrants to similar individuals remaining in their country of origin, which necessitates data on individuals in both sending and receiving countries. Most datasets, however, include information only on one context or the other. To overcome this dilemma, our project standardizes and integrates micro data on migrants in receiving countries with micro-data on women in countries of origin to create novel data sources that allows us to weight migrants to resemble highly similar individuals in countries of origin who did not migrate. The first phase of our project focuses on migrants from Sub-Saharan and Africa and Turkey to France (combining data on West and Central African and Turkish migrants in France with data on women in corresponding origin countries). The second phase of the project focuses on migrants from Latin America to the United States.
Goal 2: Better understand the mechanisms of fertility change among migrants
The project provides important insights into the mechanisms underlying fertility change among migrant populations. First, the project explores how migration is associated with changes in women’s access to and usage of contraception and reproductive healthcare. Second, the project investigates the social determinants of migrants’ preferences about fertility, family, and national identification as important mechanisms of family change. Third, the project looks at how policies—including access to health and reproductive healthcare and also immigration enforcement—are associated with fertility preferences and behaviors among migrants.
Key Findings
Migration and Fertility
Drawing on research that takes a transnational perspective, we standardize and integrate data collected in France (the destination country in our study) and data collected in six high-fertility African countries (the senders). Descriptively we show that African migrants in our sample have higher children ever born (CEB) than native-French women, but lower CEB than women in corresponding origin countries, thus suggesting that socialization into pronatalist norms is an incomplete explanation for migrant fertility in the first generation. We go on to test alternative explanations for migrant fertility by conducting multivariate analyses with entropy balancing that weight migrants’ background characteristics to resemble women in both origin and destination countries. Results are supportive of both selection and adaptation perspectives, although we find little evidence of migration-related disruption of childbearing.
Migration and Contraception
We conduct a multi-sited analysis of migration and contraceptive use by standardizing and integrating a sample of African migrants in France from six West and Central African countries in the Trajectoires et Origines survey with a sample of women living in the same six African countries in the Demographic and Health Surveys. Descriptive analyses indicate that the contraceptive use of migrants in the sample more closely aligns with native-French women than women from origin countries. In particular, migrants report dramatically higher use of long-acting reversible contraception and short acting hormonal methods of contraception and lower use of traditional methods of contraception compared to women in countries of origin. Though migrants differ from women in countries of origin on observed characteristics including education and family background, re-weighting women in origin countries to resemble migrants on these observed characteristics does little to explain differences in contraceptive use between the two groups.
Funding
This work is supported with grant SES 1918274 from the National Science Foundation to Drs. Julia Behrman and Abigail Weitzman and is also supported by grant, P2CHD042849, Population Research Center, awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.