Abstract
First generation migrants from countries with high fertility usually have more children than the native population of receiving countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. But is this also true for marriage migrants, who migrate under very special circumstances? This paper investigates the fertility of marriages of German men and their marriage migrant spouses from poorer countries, using a database of 268 German-German couples and 461 couples made up of German men and women from Thailand, Brazil, Poland and Russia. The results show that marriage migrants’ fertility is far below that of German-German couples. To a large part, this can be attributed to the partnership biography of husband and wife – especially when considering children from former relationships and a higher age at partnership formation. Bi-national marriages in which the husband is familiar with the wife’s culture are more inclined to have children. If the husband speaks the wife’s native language well and if he lived abroad prior to meeting his wife, childbirth is more probable than if he is ignorant of the wife’s culture and always resided in his native country.
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Notes
- 1.
In contrast to age and BMI, socio-economic indicators such as education and income do not have a clear predictive power for the choice of a wife from poorer countries. Rich and poor men as well as highly educated and low educated men alike choose women from these marriage markets. However, there are country-specific differences. Whereas men who marry women from Thailand have below average education, men with Brazilian wives tend to have a slightly higher income than the average population (Glowsky 2011).
- 2.
Out of all childless men and women in Germany above the age of 30 who do not plan to have a child, 19 % name an unfavorable health status for their decision (Ruckdeschel 2007).
- 3.
Out of all couples, 7.5 % disagree about the number of children in the current relationship, which may be due to differing views about whether children from earlier relationships who live with the couple should count as “children with the current partner”. Since this issue cannot be resolved, these couples were excluded from the analysis.
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Glowsky, D. (2015). Fertility in Marriages Between German Men and Marriage Migrants. In: Aybek, C., Huinink, J., Muttarak, R. (eds) Spatial Mobility, Migration, and Living Arrangements. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10021-0_4
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