Immigration and fertility

If it were not for immigration, the EU would declare the beginning of its demographic death as early as 2015. In other words, deaths are projected to outnumber births in the EU in less than a decade, according to Eurostat.

What kind of impact would this demographic development have on the social and political scene in Europe remains to be seen and it largely depends on the future reproductive considerations of both European and immigrant populations. This in turn depends not only on both populations' well being, marital status or education, but also on the intensity of their religious affiliations.

Studies show that immigrants to Europe tend to be more religious than the European resident population. It has been estimated that in the next 50 years, half of the non-European immigrants to the EU will be Muslims. Secularisation is not one of the major traits in societies which are predominantly Muslim, hence a strong, life-time retention of Muslim religious affiliation.

From the East to the West, different world populations demonstrate that fertility has always been strongly linked to religious affiliation. The ultra-Orthodox Jewish population's recent increase in the number of children per mother i.e. total fertility rate (TFR) to 7.6 children is in a complete contrast to a decline in secular Jews' TFR to 2.3 children i.e. barely above the population replacement level. The French Quebecker Catholic population's rebellion against its religious establishment resulted in a TFR reduction from 15 to less than two children. The condition for higher fertility is to start with early childbearing and vice-versa.

The Maltese TFR has experienced a cliff dive in the last decade from two children in 1997 to a mere 1.4 children per mother in 2007. The demographic cost of postponing first birth in case of Maltese mothers is a reduction in odds of having a second child of 2.4 per cent for each year of postponement. Adding the age limit makes the results even more telling: the probability that the Maltese married mother with tertiary education gives birth to a second child before age of 28 is 31 per cent, while this probability goes to over 80 per cent in the case of single mothers without tertiary education (Miljanic' Brinkworth, 2008). This demographic casualty is partly due to secularisation and partly to all other factors including economic considerations, change in aspirations and attitudes towards family life and life in general.

Similarly to the EU population, the recent influx of immigrants to Malta contributes to an increase in the number of births. In 2007, 79 per cent of babies registered at the Public Registry in Valletta were those with both parents being Maltese, while the remaining 21 per cent were either with one or with both parents being foreign. In order to understand the future impact of immigration on fertility, it is important to know not only the immigrants' religious denomination, but also the strength of their religious beliefs. This helps to determine how quickly they do or do not adopt the host population's reproductive norms.

In countries where population census caters for questions on religious affiliation, demographers are in a position to project the population's composition by religion. In Austria, this kind of information exists and it is expected that the share of the Austrian Muslim population will increase from 4.6 per cent in 2001 to a maximum of 25 per cent in 2051. This is due to immigration, but also to higher fertility (facilitated by earlier child bearing) of the Muslim population in this country. History proves that there is a hidden fertility bonus linked to a strong religious affiliation irrespective of its denomination. This is the reason why demographers often take the Anabaptist Hutterite population as a yardstick for analysing the maximum of human reproductive potential.

With the influx of immigration, the attention to European society is slowly moving from its post-materialistic traits embedded in the theory of "the second demographic transition" which hails the child king - l'enfant roi - to "the third demographic transition" postulating the unfolding change of the European ethnic profile. The theory also says that continued migration of one population into another which reproduces at sub-replacement level of fertility, would eventually lead to a complete ethnic replacement.

Given the fact that modern and often secularised cohorts of parents have low fertility considerations and ultimately low fertility outcomes, the likelihood that the offspring would adopt even lower norms is reasonably high. Perhaps it is time that demography and sociology of religion put their heads together and examine some future trends.

Dr Miljanic Brinkworth lectures on demography at the University of Malta.