Immigrants to Canada have adopted the country’s low-fertility rates, new research finds

Research by Western University researchers found that age at migration, immigration stream and source country all play a role in fertility. Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images

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Economic migrants, who make up the bulk of Canada’s immigrants, have adopted their new country’s behaviour in one significant area — they have very low fertility rates, new research suggests.

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“Immigrants are feeling the low-fertility pressure of Canada here, like everyone else,” says demographer and sociologist Rachel Margolis, a professor at Western University, and one of the authors of a new paper on immigration and fertility.

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Even groups with relatively high fertility — family stream and refugees — are also below the replacement level of 2.1 children, according to the research. Additionally, the top three source countries Canada draws immigrants from are low-fertility nations. The total fertility rate in India, the top source country, for instance, has dropped to 1.9 children per woman.

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At a record low of 1.25 children per woman, Canada has entered an “ultra-low fertility” era. In 2024, it joined a list of several countries, including Finland, Italy and South Korea, with a fertility rate below 1.3.

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Canada grows its population and bolsters the economy through immigration. But that short-term solution for population loss doesn’t address long-term population aging, according to the study.

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While immigrants have higher fertility than native-born Canadians, the divide is shrinking and will likely continue to do so, the study suggests.

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“Our findings highlight that immigrants have low and declining fertility, and so these assumptions, the way that our government is sustaining and growing the population, is a short-term fix,” says Margolis. “As these immigrants are aging, and if they’re having fewer than replacement kids, which they are, we’re still going to have a smaller younger generation. We’re still going to be dealing with population aging.”

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Falling birth rates affect many areas of society, including the economy, housing and health care, but “the most important implications are existential,” says Howard Ramos, a Western University sociology professor and another of the report’s authors, along with Yue Teng and Yoko Yoshida. “There is no economy without people.”

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There are also more individual implications of low fertility, says Margolis. “There’s a lot of research that finds that in Canada and across other similar countries, on average, people have fewer kids than they want. They have fewer kids than they think are ideal. They have fewer kids than they actually want in their lives, and this is a problem.”

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Immigrants to Canada are a diverse group, which the authors say is often overlooked in immigrant fertility research. Historically, they’ve had higher fertility than native-born people, but this finding is based on research from the late 1990s. “Despite the rapid expansion of immigration to Canada, studies on the fertility patterns of immigrants have not kept pace,” they write.

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Recently published in Population Research and Policy Review, their paper examines immigrant fertility in Canada over two decades. It found that age at migration, immigration stream and source country all play a role in fertility.