The ?Mportance of Foreigners' Childbearing in South Europe

Byron Kotzamanis, University of Thessaly
Anastasia Kostaki , Athens University of Economics & Business

Migration directly affects the size and the composition of a population, especially when the immigrant populations have different levels and patterns of fertility, nuptiality and mortality. After 1990, migration became the main engine of population growth in many European countries, among others, in Greece, Spain and Italy. At the same time, in these countries, a common belief is that foreigner women have higher fertility than natives, which can weigh on welfare benefits for families and, in long term, this fact may lead to a situation in which the foreigner population will be larger than the native one. This paper examines the influence of foreigners on childbearing trends for the period 2007-2017, in Greece, Italy, and Spain. The contribution of foreigners to fertility is analyzed in the basis of data of births by age and nationality for 2007-2017 (fertility rates, TFR, and mean age at birth for native and foreign citizens). The results are indicative of a diversity between the three countries and reveal that foreigner women typically retain higher levels of period fertility than the native ones, but the gap typically diminishes over time (the notion of exceptional high foreigner fertility, present in the discourses in South Europe, is not supported by the analysis), since the foreigner’s fertility in these countries falls sharper than that of nationals.

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 Presented in Session P3. Poster Session Migration, Economics, Environment, Methods, History and Policy