Fertility of immigrant women in Italy: outcomes from unconventional data

This paper contributes to the debate on the immigrant population’s reproductive behaviors using an unconventional survey not designed for demographic analysis. Applying the own-child method of young co-residing children, who are unlikely to have left home, we describe the patterns of the numbers of births realized after migration to women aged 15-40 years old and we look at the main determinants of fertility fitting a Poisson model. According to the literature, among immigrant women the migratory patterns , the gender roles and the country/area of origin represent important determinants of migrants’ fertility after migration, while the individual characteristics and destination contexts seem less important.