The fertility of immigrant women in Australia

The 1991 census did not ask women how many children they had ever had. Because of this, there has been a gap in our understanding of fertility trends. The author uses the `own-children' method which allows him to fill this gap. He analyses the fertility of immigrant women in Australia and discovers that, by 1991, most had lower fertility than Australian-born women. Most also had lower fertility than women of a comparable age in their countries of origin. Second-generation `migrants' had converged even more closely to the Australian norm. Copyright. Monash University and the author/s