First child of immigrant workers and their descendants in West Germany

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of immigration on the transition to motherhood among women from Turkey, Italy, Spain, Greece, and the former Yugoslavia in West Germany. A hazard-regression analysis is applied to data of the German Socio-Economic Panel study. We distinguish between the first and second immigrant generation. The results show that the transition rates to a first birth of first-generation immigrants are elevated shortly after they move country. Elevated birth risks that occur shortly following the immigration are traced back to an interrelation of events - these are migration, marriage, and first birth. We do not find evidence of a fertility-disruption effect after immigration. The analysis indicates that second-generation immigrants are more adapted to the lower fertility levels of West Germans than their mothers’ generation is.event history analysis, fertility, international migration, migrant workers from South/Southeastern Europe, West Germany