Abstract

PIP: Data from the 1982 census and other sources are used to compare marriage patterns and fertility of the foreign population resident in France with those of the French population. The 3,680,000 foreigners resident in France in 1982 comprised 7% of the population and represented diverse national origins resulting from successive waves of migration. Women represented less than 40% of the foreign population aged 30-50 years in 1982, with sex ratios particularly disturbed among Africans and even more among Europeans. Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians comprise almost 40% of foreigners aged 20-30 years. Despite the disturbed sex ratios at younger ages, only about 3-4% of foreigners remain single at 40 years except among Spaniards, whose proportion ever married never exceeds 90%. Among foreign women born between 1917-46 who lived in France in 1982 and had married before age 35, the average age at 1st marriage was about the same as for French women, around 22.5 years, but the Portuguese and Spanish women had later marriage ages while among women from the Maghreb, over 1/2 were married by age 20. In the 1970s the marriage age of Spanish and Portuguese women declined while that of Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians increased to 22.6 on average between 1975-79 compared to 22.1 years for French women. Among foreigners in France in 1975-82, 47% of those marrying returned to their country of origin for the ceremony. French women born between 1917-36 had an average completed family size of 2.65 children compared to 3.60 for foreign women in the same cohorts. Algerian and other Maghreb women had nearly 6 children each, Portuguese women averaged 3.6 children, and Italians and Spanish had about 3 each. Couples in which both partners were foreign had larger families than couples in which 1 partner was French. In 1960, births to foreign mothers represented less than 5% of births in France, while in 1982, 86,600 of the 800,000 children born in France, or 11% were born to foreign mothers. 46,000 infants were born to Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian women. In 1982, the average number of children/fertile aged woman was 1.97 for the population as a whole, 1.89 for French, 3.30 for foreign women, 5.84 for Moroccan, 5.11 for Tunisian, and 4.35 for Algerian women. The average family size of Algerian women in France declined from almost 7.5 in the 1960s to 4.7 in the late 1970s and 4.3 in 1981-82. In 1980-82, 12.7% of births in the general population, 12.8% of births to French mothers, 8.1% of births to foreign mothers, 8.8% to Algerians, 3.1% to Moroccans, and 2.6% to Tunisians were outside of marriage.