Fertility among recent immigrant women to Canada, 1991: an examination of the disruption hypothesis

Recent studies show that current fertility is higher for women who immigrated to Canada than for Canadian-born women. This represents a reversal of the historical pattern that can perhaps be partly explained by the more pronounced decline of fertility among the Canadian-born compared with the foreign-born population and the higher proportion of Non-Europeans among recent immigrants.
Recent studies also provide support for the disruption hypothesis which suggests that during the period immediately following immigration, foreign-born fertility is depressed but subsequently rises somewhat and then declines as duration of stay in Canada increases.
However, this article shows that fertility immediately following immigration does not appear to be disrupted by the immigration process: immigrant women who came to Canada between 1986 and 1991 had a higher current fertility than those who immigrated in earlier periods. This finding was obtained by calculating the ratio of infants age 0 to women of childbearing ages using 1991 census data. Previous studies that had found a disruption effect used a ratio of children aged 0 to 4.