Nearly two in five babies born in Switzerland last year were born to foreign mothers, a Swiss governmental study has found, nearly double the rate of 20 years ago.
The study also showed that foreign women living in Switzerland were more likely to be of child bearing age than their Swiss counterparts, The Local has reported.
The study was undertaken by the Federal Statistics Office (FSO), which analyses trends in Switzerland on a wide range of measures. Yesterday the FSO released figures showing that net migration in the country is also up, reaching 89,500 last year. In total the population rose by 100,600 to 8.14 million in 2013.
22.1 percent of women in Switzerland are immigrants, up fron 14.4 percent in 1990. This means that there are over 900,000 foreign born women in Switzerland today. And the rate of fecundity within that population is also higher – foreign women aged 15 to 24 are four times more likely to have children than their Swiss contemporaries.
Of the 82,700 babies born in Switzerland in 2013, nearly 39 percent had non-Swiss mothers, up from 19.6 percent in 1990, according to the FSO report. Three quarters of the foreign mothers were European in origin, with 25 percent of that group coming from the countries that made up the former Yugoslavia (that is, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia-Hertzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Slovenia). 18.9 percent were German, 13 percent Portugese, 8.7 percent Italian, 6.8 percent French, 4.7 percent Turkish and 3.3 percent Spanish.
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