Trends in Partnering between Foreign-Born and Native-Born Individuals: A Global Perspective

Globalization and international migration have profoundly impacted various aspects of our lives, extending even to the most intimate spheres, such as romantic relationships. With the increasing movement of people across borders, questions arise about the nature and frequency of partnerships between individuals from different cultural and national backgrounds. In this context, we address two key questions: 1) Have mixed unions—those between native-born and foreign-born individuals—become more common than in previous decades? 2) How do these trends manifest once we account for the size and composition of the foreign-born population within each country? To answer these questions, we analyze trends in both the absolute and relative prevalence of mixed-nativity unions across 82 countries, providing a comprehensive global perspective. We rely on census and large-scale survey data harmonized by the International Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), which allows us to examine patterns across decades ranging from 1960 to 2016, depending on the availability of data for each country. Importantly, to observe changes over time, we restrict our analysis to countries with at least two census samples, ensuring that trends can be meaningfully compared across different time periods. Our primary focus is on native-immigrant unions, or mixed-nativity unions, defined as partnerships in which one partner is native-born and the other is foreign-born. Our findings show that there is no uniform upward trend worldwide. Instead, in absolute terms, the number of native-immigrant unions has increased significantly only in Europe and North America. The analysis of odds ratios, which adjusts for the size of the immigrant population, further suggests that this increase is primarily driven by the growing number of immigrants, rather than by substantial shifts in the preferences or behaviors of natives and immigrants when it comes to forming partnerships.