Today, Rocco Molinari from the University of Bologna presented
his joint work with Roberto Impicciatore and Livia Elisa Ortensi titled
Legal Status and Immigrants’ Fertility in Italy:
Investigating Previous Undocumented Histories
Stay tuned for the next appointment on 16th January 2024!
Abstract
It is broadly recognised that international migration is a life course event with a potentially significant impact on both the timing of births and completed fertility. So far, for substantive data limitation, the extensive effort to understand migrants’ fertility has been carried out on the subgroup of migrants who have the legal right to stay in the destination country. In this study, we investigate through retrospective survey data the linkage between previous undocumented experience and fertility patterns in Italy, a country that in the last decades has hosted a large number of undocumented migrants, who were subsequently legalised though recurrent regularisation programmes. We use data from the Social Condition and Integration of Foreign Citizens (SCIF), a nationally representative survey of individuals living in families with immigrant backgrounds conducted in Italy by the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) in 2011 and 2012. We use Event History Analysis techniques to study whether for non-EU immigrant women time to a (first or second) birth in Italy is affected by the previos undocumented experience (from the access to the first residence permit attainment), accounting for other individual and migratory background characteristics. Furthermore, we develope Poisson Models to asses the relationship between previous irregular experience and completed fertility. Our independent variable of interest is the legal status both considered as a time-fixed indicator (distinguishing among Continuously legal and Previously undocumented immigrants) and (in EH Models) as a time-variyng indicator of the current legal status, changing over the life course, coded as a dummy variable (documented/undocumented).