Second Generation Mothers - Do the children of immigrants adjust their fertility to host country norms?

Abstract

For many countries, like the United States, Canada and Australia, immigration has played an important role in the settlement processes. In Sweden, immigration has been a largely post-war phenomenon, but it has nevertheless served as an important input for the transformation of Swedish society and has left an imprint on the composition of the Swedish population that could not be foreseen 50 years ago. From numbering fewer than 100,000 in 1945, the foreign-born population in Sweden had increased to 1.2 million in 2008, and Statistics Sweden projects that this number will reach 1.7 million in the year 2050. Initially, migrants to Sweden were fleeing the horrors and destruction of World War II in Europe, but shortly after the war labor force migration from the neighboring Nordic countries and Southern Europe became the dominant force. In the early 1970s the face of immigration changed and has since been dominated by refugee and family reunification migration from a wide range of countries from all over the world. The widespread demand for manual and industrial labor which was an important determinant of immigration streams in the 1950s and 1960s became less important and, since the early 1970s, migration policy and the outbursts of war, famine and terror on behalf of anti-democratic regimes have largely determined the streams of immigrants to Sweden. This intense and multi-faceted immigration experience resulted in the varied society of today. Not only does Swedish society contain a large immigrant population, but the children of immigrants, also known as the second generation, make up a sizeable and growing fraction of the Swedish population.