DOES MASS INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION SLOW POPULATION GROWTH?
Most analysts hold that migration reduces population growth rates: migrant birth rates usually fall as migrants move from developing countries to settle in developed countries. This is usually true, but: • Firstly, the usual definition of ‘migrant’ (a person living in a country which is not his/her country of birth) counts only a single generation. By doing so it understates the long-term impact of cumulative migration on population change. • Secondly, the underlying number of migrants at a given level of fertility must be taken into account, as well as their age. The impact on population growth in a receiving country of 100,000 women immigrants a year with a total fertility rate of 2.1 births per woman is clearly more significant than the impact of 1,000 younger women immigrants arriving each year with an average TFR per woman of 4.5 births. In the UK, births to immigrants accounted for 18.6 per cent of all births in England and Wales in 2003, and migration is expected to account for
