Fertility of Immigrant Women in Japan:An Own Children Analysis by Census-micro Data

The number of immigrants in Japan is increasing rapidly and almost doubled in these 20 years after the reform of the Immigration Control Law in 1989. Therefore there is a growing necessity for such an analysis of demographic impacts of migration in Japan, as in the new "countries of immigrants" such as Italy and Spain etc.
There are two research questions in this study. 1)Is fertility of immigrant women in Japan disrupted due to international migration? 2)Is their fertility above/below that of native women?
A data-set used in this study is all the samples of foreigners from the Japanese population census (year of 2000).Fertility is estimated by own-children method and its validity is checked by multivariate analysis.
As a result, the present study revealed that immigrant women’s fertility in Japan is disrupted by migration among the people coming from less developed countries than Japan. In addition, we can also ascertain a catch-up effect soon after migration. The level of fertility is lower than the Japanese women in many nationalities; however it will often increase to the level higher than the Japanese women in longer term. Moreover, these finding are ascertained by multivariate analysis. The next challenge is to ascertain validity of these findings in longer term, and compare them to other countries.