Does Immigration Affect Natives’ Fertility?
A popular strategy used by many governments in countries facing the problem of declining birth rates and an ageing population is replacement migration. But could this, in fact, lead to lower fertility among native women? Honestly, I do not have the answer, and I doubt few scholars have it too. This is because the academic literature has been surprisingly silent on this. Yet, a synthesis of several strands of literature would suggest that immigration possibly affects native fertility. Decades of immigration research has now shown that immigration has implications for accommodation costs (rents and housing prices), perceptions of job security among natives, and prices of local services like childcare (migrants may contribute to the labor supply of jobs involving childcare). At the same time, fertility research has also shown that accommodation costs, job security, and the availability and affordability of childcare crucially affect people’s childbearing decisions. Bringing these together, it’s not difficult to see that immigration may have an impact on the fertility of native women. What is unclear though is the direction of this effect. Despite this, very few studies have attempted to explore the relationship between immigration and native fertility.
A number of years ago, I tried to do exactly this by examining how fertility rates among women in Miami were affected after the U.S. city experienced a sharp and unexpected wave of immigration from Cuba in the 1980s (known as the Mariel Boatlift). Interestingly, I found that while fertility rates fell temporarily among women who were home renters, fertility rates remained largely unaffected among women who were homeowners. This differential impact suggests that one of the channels through which immigration might affect natives’ fertility is through the housing market (by increasing rents and housing prices, immigration inflows possibly result in people having less resources left over for childbearing). However, this paper, which was published in the IZA Journal of Development and Migration, is clearly limited in terms of its external validity since migrants in the Mariel Boatlift had relatively low levels of education and because this event occurred in the 1980s, at a time where norms in childbearing may have been quite different.
More generally, does immigration have an impact on the fertility of natives? And if so, in which direction? How will immigration affect fertility in Singapore, in particular? Given the paucity of knowledge, this is a potentially fruitful area for further investigation.
Further readings:
Seah, Kelvin KC. (2018) The effect of immigration shocks on native fertility outcomes: evidence from a natural experiment. IZA Journal of Development and Migration, 8(18). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40176-018-0126-6.
