Abstract

PIP: Many immigrants have come to the US since the mid-1960s. The demographic effects of this phenomenon may be seen in both the changing racial and ethnic composition of the population and in the increasing contribution of immigration to sustaining population growth. Given the current below replacement level of fertility in the country, US population growth depends increasingly upon the entry of new immigrants each year and their subsequent fertility. Over much of the 20th century, immigrants had consistently lower fertility than native-born women. This situation changed, however, since the 1970s with the arrival of large numbers of immigrants from countries with high fertility. Studies based upon the US census have shown that, despite considerable variation according to country of origin, recent immigrants have higher fertility on average than native-born women. Moreover, the gap between immigrant and native fertility levels appears to have increased during the 1980s. By 1986, immigrant women aged 18-44 had about one-quarter child more than similarly aged native-born women. This article compares both the fertility behavior and expectations for future childbearing of foreign and native-born women in the US with the goal of analyzing the sources of the growing fertility gap between immigrant and native women, and exploring the extent to which immigrants adapt their fertility once in the US. Data are drawn from the 1980 US Census and the 1986 and 1988 June Current Population Surveys. The author found that the immigrant-native fertility gap increased during the 1980s, not because immigrant fertility increased, but because fertility dropped at a faster rate for natives than for immigrants. The relatively high fertility of immigrants compared to natives can be explained by compositional differences with respect to age, education, income, and ethnicity. The two analyses of adaptation, however, yielded different results. The synthetic cohort analysis, which traced the fertility behavior of a fixed cohort of immigrants during the 1980s, found little evidence of adaptation or assimilation, except for immigrants from southeast Asia. On the other hand, the analysis of fertility expectations suggests that although immigrants expect to have higher fertility than similar natives, they tend to adapt their fertility goals over time, both within and across generations.