The Nation - News from Jan. 6, 1988

One of every 10 babies born in the United States is the offspring of a mother who came here from another country, the Census Bureau reported. Of the 3,625,000 births in the United States in 1986, about 370,000 were the children of foreign-born women, the bureau said. That 10% rate is up from about 7.5% of births in 1983, the only previous time births to foreign-born women were calculated, said Martin O’Connell of the bureau’s Fertility Statistics Branch. This increase appears to stem from a rise in the overall population of foreign-born women in the nation, and a change in their composition with fewer from Europe and more from Latin America, O’Connell said. He said that Latin American women tend to have a higher fertility rate than European women.