The Impact of Immigration on Natives’ Fertility: Evidence from Syrians in Turkey

the Monday 24 June 2019 at l’Ined, salle Sauvy de 11h30 à 12h30

Presented by : Berkay Özcan (LSE - The London School of Economics and Political Science) ; Discussant : Sander Wagner (CREST)

The discussion on whether immigration can solve the problems of population aging often focuses on the fertility of immigrants. Additionally, standard population projections consider the impact of  net migration on population growth but assume that the natives’ fertility does not change in response to immigration. By contrast, we show that the native’s fertility behaviour is affected by immigration. We use the Syrian mass migration to specific Turkish provinces shortly after the 2011 civil war as an exogenous source of variation in exposure to immigration and show that natives’ fertility in the affected provinces increased relative to the provinces that are less affected. Our findings are consistent across fertility measures both at the aggregate and individual levels. We provide further analyses to test four potential mechanisms and to show heterogeneity in the fertility response by population subgroups. We find that the factors related to labor market and transmission of fertility norms via natives’ social interactions with Syrians can plausibly explain the increase in the natives’ fertility.

Berkay Özcan

Dr. Berkay Ozcan is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Policy and the School of Public Policy of the London School of Economics (LSE). Prior to joining LSE, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Yale University. He has held visiting researcher positions at Princeton University (2006); at the Essex University (2007) and at the University College London (UCL) (2017). He is an external Research Fellow at the Center for Research and Analysis on Migration (CReAM) of the UCL and has been awarded a Jemolo Fellowship at the Nuffield College of the University of Oxford (2015).  He studies the relationship between demographic processes and economic outcomes. He published in prominent journals in economics, demography, and sociology, such as Annual Review of Sociology, Demography, PNAS, Journal Human Resources, European Economic Review, in addition to others. His research has been covered more than 60 media outlets, including the New York Times, Huffington Post, Daily Mail, The Telegraph, etc.  He has given many radio and TV interviews including at the Irish Radio, the BBC, etc. in English and Spanish. He frequently provides policy consultancy to the public sector in the UK, such as Public Health England (PHE), Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and international organizations, such as the European Investment Bank (EIB).