Women: Evidence from High- Fertility Source Countries

Although women have constituted the majority of immigrant flows during most of the post-World War I1 period, ’ surprisingly little attention has been devoted to them in the research on immigrants by economists. This study addresses this research need by examining immigrant women’s fertility be-havior. I focus on immigrants from the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. This is a particularly interesting group to study for two rea-sons. First, immigration from these areas has increased considerably in recent years, from 29 percent of immigrants in the 1950s to 77 percent in the 1970s (Blau 1986). * Second, fertility rates in many, although not all, of these source countries areconsiderably higher than those in the United States, averaging in excess of 5.5 children per woman during the early 1960s and 1970s, in com-parison to 3.3 and 2.0 children per woman, respectively, for these periods in Francine D. Blau is professor of economics and labor and industrial relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economi