Childbearing Behavior after Migration: The Experience of Immigrant Women in Taiwan, 1987-2003

This paper indentifies the factors that affect the childbearing behaviors for marriage immigrants in Taiwan during 1987 to 2003, measured by individual level data for 87, 798 observations obtained from QLSFS (Quasi-longitudinal Study on Living Status of the Foreign Born Spouses in Taiwan). This survey contains the socio-demographic information for both immigrant women and their native husbands, which allows us to evolve a study concerning both the time since migration and the interrelatedness between marriage couples’ SES (social economic status) and their childbearing. In our study, we found that women from different migration groups tend to display higher levels of childbearing. Instead of finding a disruption effect, we found migration and family building closely adhere to each other, that caused to an elevated fertility shortly after immigrant women had migrated to Taiwan. Besides, we also found the fluctuations of period trends in parity-specific fertility appear to be affected by the changing size of migration trend. One perhaps the most interesting finding in this study is that we found the childbearing behaviors of the immigrant women was largely determined by the native husbands’ SES