UK immigrants' birthrate falls to lowest on record, converging with local women's rate.

Without immigrants from poorer lands, many European countries would have seen their population falling for decades now. Immigration is what makes the UK, France, Germany... different from Japan, where a very ethnically homogeneous population is shrinking by around 200,000 heads a year.

Even the Queen's family was from Germany

Yet, foreign-born citizens are also not the magic fix. After a while, they, or more likely their children, will become locals, with local reproductive pattern. 

From the Telegraph: "No sex please we're British now"

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"It could be a case of “no sex please we’re British now”- births to foreign-born mothers have fallen for the first time in a decade suggesting an end to the UK’s migrant baby boom.

New official figures also show that the fertility rate among foreign-born women in England and Wales fell to its lowest level on record last year.

But after a decade of mass migration the proportion of newborn babies with a mother originally from overseas also reached its highest level, the figures from the Office for National Statistics show."

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"The Total Fertility Rate – which estimates how many children a typical woman would have in their lifetime if they replicated current patterns – fell to 2.19 children per woman among immigrants, down from 2.29 a year earlier.

It was the lowest rate since annual records began in 2004 and the ONS said it was also below rates indicated in the 2001 and 1991 censuses.

While immigrants have traditionally had more children than people born in the UK, the drop suggests that birth rates among immigrants are converging with those seen in British families."

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"The ONS explained in a commentary that the falling fertility rates among migrant women represents a “change in trend” and said that falling fertility was effectively outweighing the effects of continued immigration in birth figures.

The figures also suggest that the rate could fall further the longer immigrants remain in the UK."
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What will happen when the poor countries become rich, with rich world's fertility rate? And few have to migrate for economic reasons? Already, Iran's birthrate is now lower then the UK's (see part 2/7)

Polled women want more kids than they actually have. But wouldn't they say the same about salary or vacation?

What funny questions they are asking us!

When surveyed by pollsters, European and U.S. women nearing the end of their fertile years still state an ideal family size that is bigger than the real family they actually have. But if we replaced "family size" by "salary level" or "paid leave days", wouldn't we get the same answer?

From the Pew Research Center: "Birth rates lag in Europe and the U.S., but the desire for kids does not"

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"Fully 87% of women in 27 European Union (EU) member states reported that the ideal family size for them personally is two or more children, according to a 2011 Eurobarometer survey. Some 57% said that two is the ideal, and an additional 30% said three or more is ideal."..."Some 87% of EU men who had a preference also reported that their own ideal family would include two or more children."

"But when it comes to fertility, reality often doesn’t comport with the ideal. Among EU women ages 40 to 54, one-third reported that the number of children they actually have is lower than their personal ideal. This gap in ideal versus actual fertility varies markedly by country. In Denmark, fully 45% of women ages 40 to 54 reported that their actual fertility is lower than their ideal fertility, while at the other end of the spectrum, in Bulgaria just 18% of women near the end of their childbearing years reported that the number of children that they have is lower than their ideal."

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"While the U.S. has been somewhat immune to the low fertility rates that have raised concerns in Europe, actual U.S. fertility also tends to fall below the ideal. Some 52% of American women (who gave numerical responses) said their ideal is two children, and an additional 44% said that three or more children is their ideal. (While 86% of women gave numerical responses to this question, 14% reported that the ideal family size was “as many as [someone] wants.”) But 40% of U.S. women nearing the end of their childbearing years have fewer children than their ideal."
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In child-bearing as in so many other activities, life often doesn't turn out the way we dream it to be. That's why dreams are beautiful. What's new about that?