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New insights into the fertility patterns of recent Polish migrants in the United Kingdom

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Abstract

There have been important changes in the United Kingdom’s fertility and immigration in the past decade, with a large share contributed by migrants from Poland. A detailed understanding of Polish migrant fertility is lacking, however, because the relevant data are not routinely collected. This paper provides new insights into the fertility patterns of Polish migrants in the UK, and compares these patterns with those of other large immigrant groups, the UK-born population and in Poland. We use the UK Labour Force Survey with the Own Children Method, illustrating the potential of survey data for estimating immigrant fertility in settings where other data are unavailable. We first compare the fertility patterns of recent Polish migrants with those of other key recent immigrant groups and the UK-born population; estimating Age-Specific Fertility Rates (ASFRs), and Total Fertility Rates (TFRs), by country of birth for the 2004–2012 period; the proportions in each immigrant group that arrive without children; and of those childless at arrival the proportions of women who go on to have births within a short period after arrival. Next, we compare the ASFRs and TFR for Polish migrant women with those observed in Poland. Our results show that the fertility of Polish migrants is among the lowest for all population subgroups in the UK, and that Polish migrants are less likely to have children soon after arrival than other immigrant groups. The findings are consistent with migration not being so closely linked to family formation for Polish migrants as it is for immigrants in the comparison groups. We also find that the fertility patterns of Polish migrants are different from those observed in Poland with a later childbearing profile and a slightly higher TFR.

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Notes

  1. The countries known as the ‘EU8’ group are Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.

  2. The response rates are given for the March–May and June–August quarters (rather than April–June) because the LFS data were originally collected seasonally, with collection later changed to calendar quarters. The survey years used in this research have been subsequently revised to calendar quarters by ONS to allow for a consistent series of calendar quarters over time.

  3. We also conducted our analysis with unweighted LFS data, and found no substantive differences in the findings.

  4. Comparable official age-specific fertility estimates have not been released for 2012 at the time of writing, or for the whole of the UK for 2011. Therefore, we focus on the 2004–2010 time period for this validation exercise.

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Acknowledgments

This research forms part of the doctoral research of the first author, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The UK Labour Force Survey (LFS) is conducted by the Office for National Statistics and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. Access to the data is provided by the UK Data Archive. The authors are grateful to Jo Zumpe and Julie Jefferies from the Demographic Analysis Unit at the Office for National Statistics for providing official data on UK Age-Specific Fertility Rates for the 2004 to 2010 period.

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Waller, L., Berrington, A. & Raymer, J. New insights into the fertility patterns of recent Polish migrants in the United Kingdom. J Pop Research 31, 131–150 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12546-014-9125-5

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