Fertility of immigrants and its consequences for demographic ageing in Germany

Susanne Schmid, Federal Office for Migration and Refugees
Martin Kohls, Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, Germany

Fertility and migration are interdependent. Several arguments are discussed when analyzing this interaction: assimilation, selection, disruption and adaption. Data bias is a potentially further aspect, especially in immigrants’ population. Migrants often fail to deregister at the local registry office when emigrate, which cause to an increased number of the migrant population. In case of analyzing fertility of immigrants it will be underestimated, because the number of women at risk (for childbearing) are overrated. Therefore empirical immigrant studies based on official data should be interpreted carefully. In the empirical part a comparison of the fertility patterns of the immigrant vs. non-immigrant population in the former West Federal States from 1970 till 2005 are presented by age and country of origin. The fertility level of immigrants in Germany declined in the last decades, similar to the non-immigrant population. But the fertility patterns of the immigrants are still different, subject to the country of origin and time of duration in the receiving country. The impact of duration since immigration on fertility cannot be analysed with the official data. Therefore and because of the potential falsification of the official data other data sets are evaluated and the results are presented. In a second empirical part the fertility of immigrants and its consequences for demographic ageing in Germany since the 1970s are analysed and compared with the non-immigrant population. In the last decades the immigrant population was a selected population group: selected by age, sex, fertility and mortality. These factors determine the demographic ageing in the population group of the immigrants and of course in the German state at all. To reflect the impacts of these demographic events on demographic ageing in Germany, several model calculations are estimated. Detailed results are presented.