Immigrant fertility and the realization of fertility intentions are two topics of considerable interest in contemporary demographic research. Yet very few studies have explored the relationship between intended and actual fertility among immigrants and their children. Using data from the Norwegian and Swedish Generations and Gender Surveys, this article analyzes how both positive and negative short-term fertility intentions stated by men and women at Wave 1 in 2007/08 (Norway) or 2012/13 (Sweden) had been realized at register-based follow-ups three years after the initial interview. Results show that second-generation women of non-Western origin were significantly less likely than native women (defined here as Swedish-born women with two Swedish-born parents) to realize a positive fertility intention, whereas first-generation men of Western origin were significantly more likely than native men to realize a positive fertility intention. Western-origin men were also significantly less likely than native men to have an unintended birth. These findings are robust to controlling for demographic and socioeconomic characteristics at interview. Possible reasons for these intergroup realization differences include group differences in the ability to predict future changes to demographic and socioeconomic status and in the motivation to pursue the realization of a reported fertility intention. This article demonstrates that exploring immigrant-native differences in realization patterns can provide information about immigrants’ ideational and behavioral adaptation to the destination country’s fertility regime that cannot be attained by studying intended or actual fertility alone. 

Many immigrants to North America and Western Europe originate from countries where fertility patterns differ considerably between ethnic groups. Yet, earlier research on immigrant fertility in Western destination countries typically does not distinguish among immigrants’ origin beyond country or even international region of birth, an approach that risks hiding variation between sub- and transnational ethnic groups. This study uses Swedish population register data on the so-called information language of newly arrived immigrants to distinguish between BCMS-speaking (Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian) and Albanian-speaking women immigrating to Sweden from the former Yugoslavia during 1992-2001. The study uses event-history analysis to compare parity-specific transition rates of about 29,000 Yugoslavian-born women and 2.4 million native-born women from 1992 to 2017. Results show that Albanian-speakers have higher first-, second-, and third-birth transition rates than both BCMS-speakers and native women, whereas differences between BCMS-speakers and natives are generally relatively small. Beyond the study’s contribution to the understanding of fertility patterns among Yugoslavian migrants, the study also makes a general contribution to research on immigrant fertility in demonstrating that distinguishing among immigrants from the same origin country by subnational ethnicity can uncover considerable within-group heterogeneity. 

This study explores the association between religious affiliation and fertility among both immigrants and natives in Sweden. GGS data from 2012/2013 and 2021 are used to examine religion’s association with three different dimensions of fertility: the ideal number of children, short-term fertility intentions, and the achieved number of children at age 40. To disentangle the association between religious affiliation and fertility from the association between geographical origin and fertility, this study analyzes how ideal, intended, and achieved fertility vary across religious affiliations within geographical origin groups and across geographical origins within religious affiliations. Results show that Christian and Muslim immigrants who share the same geographical origin often have similar ideal, intended, and achieved fertility. Christians and Muslims often have higher ideal, intended, and achieved fertility than non-religious individuals of the same geographical origin. Within-affiliation differences in ideal, intended, and achieved fertility by geographical origin are generally larger among Christians and Muslims than among non-religious individuals. Whether religion has a larger influence on fertility preferences or behavior varies between origin and affiliation groups. This study shows that religion is an important factor in understanding fertility patterns among both immigrants and natives in Sweden. Results suggest that analyses of the association between religion and fertility among immigrants that do not consider immigrants’ geographical origin can be misleading, if group differences that are best explained as origin effects are attributed to influences from religion.