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Category: Project

Description: Drawing on research that takes a transnational perspective, we standardize and integrate data collected in France (the destination country in our study) and data collected in six high-fertility African countries (the senders). Descriptively we show that African migrants in our sample have higher children ever born (CEB) than native-French women, but lower CEB than women in corresponding origin countries, thus suggesting that socialization into pronatalist norms is an incomplete explanation for migrant fertility in the first generation. We go on to test alternative explanations for migrant fertility by conducting multivariate analyses with entropy balancing that weight migrants’ background characteristics to resemble women in both origin and destination countries. Results are supportive of both selection and adaptation perspectives, although we find little evidence of migration-related disruption of childbearing. In a secondary analysis, we conduct a multi-sited analysis of migration and contraceptive use by standardizing and integrating a sample of African migrants in France from six West and Central African countries in the Trajectoires et Origines survey with a sample of women living in the same six African countries in the Demographic and Health Surveys. Descriptive analyses indicate that the contraceptive use of migrants in the sample more closely aligns with native-French women than women from origin countries. In particular, migrants report dramatically higher use of long-acting reversible contraception and short acting hormonal methods of contraception and lower use of traditional methods of contraception compared to women in countries of origin. Though migrants differ from women in countries of origin on observed characteristics including education and family background, re-weighting women in origin countries to resemble migrants on these observed characteristics does little to explain differences in contraceptive use between the two groups. A third paper focuses on Turkish migrants to France. Descriptive analyses indicate that contraceptive use of migrant women from Turkey in France is more comparable to that of non-migrant women in France compared to non-migrant women in Turkey. To address migrant selectivity on observed characteristics in multivariate analyses, non-migrant groups in France and Turkey are re-weighted with entropy balancing to resemble migrants on observed characteristics. Multivariate results indicate that there are sizeable differences in contraceptive usage between Turkish migrants and non-migrant Turkish women, which undermines the hypothesis of selection on observables. Yet, there are no significant differences between migrants and non-migrant French women in contraceptive methods, thus supporting an adaptation perspective. Supplementary analyses highlight several pathways that could help explain these findings.