Early Childbearing of Immigrant Women and Their Descendants in Spain

We investigate early childbearing among Maghrebi and Latin American immigrant women and their descendants in Spain. We use a new database linking Natural Movement of the Population records between 2011 and 2015 to the 2011 Spanish Census. To identify whether immigrants’ descendants converge toward the Spanish very reduced profile of early childbearing, we run Poisson regression models. While Latin American immigrants converge toward the native population, among Maghrebi immigrants, the difference among those who arrived in Spain at more than 15 years of age is reduced, but the difference does not disappear in the second generation. To examine the differences in early childbearing between these two immigrant groups, we implement a multivariate decomposition. The mean number of children born between 2011 and 2015 was 0.12 for Latin American and 0.32 for Maghrebi immigrants. Differences in measured characteristics account for 39.72% of this difference and differences in effects account for 60.28%.