To help societies in Europe combat their decreasing fertility rates, many see the immigrant populations as a potential solution to help alleviate the situation. However, this is not always reality. In a recent study, Allan Puur and colleagues give some evidence by examining childbearing behaviours of Russians in Estonia.
With the use of data from the Russian and Estonian Generation and Gender surveys, the authors found that Russian Estonians had childbearing patterns that were similar to Russia. First generation Russians in Estonia and their descendants also had very similar fertility patterns. The differences in fertility behaviours were mainly concentrated in second and third births. Russian Estonians were more likely to have less third births than Estonians and women in Russia. The authors speculate that one reason for lower fertility rates by Russian Estonians is their less advantageous economic position in the country and the accompanying economic uncertainty, which may cause them to decide to have fewer children. However, the emergence of lower fertility among the Russians in Estonia several decades prior to the transition to a market economy makes attributing the fertility differentials to economic uncertainty questionable.
From this study, the authors drew several conclusions: The idea that immigrants can help ease the situation of declining fertility levels in countries is not always true and in this specific case, they may actually contribute to the decline. These results also stress the importance of comprehensive integration policies in Estonia since linguistically divided schools are still being used. Research has shown that less selective school systems result in better educational and labour market outcomes, which, based on this study, could also now include fertility-related outcomes.
This publication is partly funded by the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement n° 739511 for the project Generations and Gender Programme: Evaluate, Plan, Initiate