How Does Internal Migration Impact the Fertility Behaviour of Individuals? An Analysis across the Global South.

Wenxiu Du , EPFL
Dorothee Beckendorff, EPFL
Mathias Lerch, EPFL

The fertility behaviour of migrants has long been contested. Many studies concluded that migrants have different fertility than non-migrants through socialisation, adaptation, selection and disruption hypotheses. These hypotheses are validated through different country-specific and regional studies, but there lack systematic and macroscopic studies that test them and contextualise their applicability. This study intends to fill this gap in our understanding of migrants’ fertility, by employing newly available microcensus data with detailed fertility and migratory information, coupled with time-varying urban hierarchy classification. The result suggests that younger migrants are slightly selective toward destination fertility prior migration and adopt to destination fertility post migration to different magnitude depending on migratory flow. The older migrants have similar fertility as their origin when moving down the urban hierarchy, and more selective towards destination fertility when moving up. This study shows that socialisation, adaptation and selection hypothesis are each applicable for certain flows and migrants, and we did not observe disruption hypothesis.

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 Presented in Session P4. Migration, Migrants, and Mobility