How many and when? Different approaches to study fertility of migrants in Italy

Patrizia Giannantoni, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
Eleonora Mussino, Stockholm University
Giuseppe Gabrielli, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
Salvatore Strozza, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II

This paper intends to give a contribution to the study of migrants' reproductive behaviors , sourcing data from a survey not specifically designed for demographic analysis ("Income and living conditions of households with foreigners", 2009). Applying the own-children method, we reconstruct the number and dates of birth of children born to immigrant women after their arrival in Italy. We focused on foreign women (15-40 years at the interview) arrived in Italy after the age of 15, and explore factors influencing their reproductive behaviors making use of a two-fold approach: looking jointly to quantum and tempo of fertility realized after migration. Namely we studied total number of children and timing to first birth, after migration to Italy has occurred, fitting a Poisson model and an event-history analysis respectively. The work stresses particularly the effects of home-country background and migratory pattern to explain fertility outcomes at destination. Our findings confirm that migration strategy (i.e. reason for migration, age at arrival and children born before migration) together with country/area of origin indeed represent important determinants of migrants’ fertility at destination both for the final number of children and for the waiting time to first birth. Results are consistent when controlled for different ages of women at the interview, which means different exposure time to the "risk" of having a birth. Further development of this work will allow us to investigate also the effects of women socio-economic situation treating these aspects as time-varying.