The Fertility of Immigrants and Natives in the United States, 2023
By Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler on May 1, 2025
This analysis of the 2023 American Community Survey (ACS) collected by the Census Bureau shows that the fertility of both immigrants (also called the foreign-born) and the U.S.-born has declined in the last 15 years. The fertility of immigrant women is somewhat higher than that of the U.S.-born; however, the presence of immigrants has only a small impact on raising overall fertility in the United States. The small impact on overall fertility rates is one of the reasons immigration does not significantly undo population aging in the United States. There is also some evidence that immigration may actually lower the fertility of the U.S.-born, perhaps by driving up housing costs, thereby reducing or potentially erasing immigration’s small positive impact on overall U.S. fertility. Although immigration does not have a large impact on overall fertility or population aging, it does add significantly to the overall size of the U.S. population.
Among the findings:
In 2023, the overall total fertility rate (TFR) in the United States, the overall average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime given current trends, was 1.8 children, 2.19 for immigrants and 1.73 for the U.S.-born.
This means the presence of immigrants raised the nation’s overall TFR by about .08 children or 4.5 percent.
The TFR of immigrants has declined somewhat more than that of the U.S.-born since 2008. In 2023, it was .57 lower than it was in 2008, while that of the U.S.-born was .35 lower.
Immigration’s ability to increase fertility is also limited by the relatively low fertility of every major racial group among the U.S.-born. The TFR of U.S.-born Hispanics is 1.81; it is 1.53 for Asians, 1.65 for blacks, and 1.75 for whites.
Compared to TFR, immigration does increase births per thousand for the entire U.S. population (men, women, and children) somewhat more, from 11.2 births per thousand without immigrants to 11.9 births per thousand with immigrants — a 6.6 percent increase.
The impact is still quite small because even though immigrants have somewhat higher fertility and are also somewhat more likely to be of reproductive age, the fertility differences with the U.S.-born are not that large and immigration adds to the entire population, not just women of reproductive age.
As is true of TFR, births per thousand for immigrants has declined more than for the U.S.-born. For immigrants, it has fallen from 23.5 births in 2008 to 16.4 births in 2023. For the U.S.-born, births per thousand fell from 13.3 to 11.2 over the same period.
Focusing only on births per thousand for women of reproductive age (15 to 50) also shows the small impact from immigration. When immigrants are included, births per thousand for women in 2023 was 51.2 and without them it was 49.3 — a 3.9 percent increase.
Even if the number of immigrant women of reproductive age doubled, along with births to this population, it would still only raise the birth rate for all women (15 to 50) by about one birth per thousand, or 2.7 percent.1
The immigrants in the United States with the highest birth rates are those from Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Central America.
Consistent with other research on the impact of the presence of immigrants and the fertility of the U.S.-born, we find a negative correlation between the immigrant share of the population and the fertility rate of U.S.-born women in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas.
There are a number of possible reasons why immigration might lower the fertility of the U.S.-born. It may drive up housing costs for families with children, lower wages, or strain public services such as schools. There is some research that also indicates that by increasing diversity, immigration may reduce marriage and fertility as well.
Although immigration has only a small impact on overall fertility and aging, it has a significant impact on population size. Based on ACS data, between 2021 and 2023 the immigrant population grew by 2.52 million, equal to 83 percent of the total increase in the U.S. population.2
https://cis.org/Report/Fertility-Immigrants-and-Natives-United-States-2023
