Among the central dimensions of reproductive racism are those narratives that link the fertility of devalued and stigmatized social groups to the (threatened) destiny of the nation. Within German debates about demography, statistics on ‘migrant women's fertility’ gained importance in the 2010s as an area of research interest of think tanks, social scientists and policy consultancy groups. This chapter identifies two narratives resulting from this research that might seem, at first glance, to be opposed to one another, but that nevertheless both support arguments against immigration: a völkisch-nationalist narrative which interprets a fertility rate higher than that of non-migrants as a threat to ethnic homogeneity, and a migration management narrative which interprets an ‘adapting’ (i.e., decreasing) migrant fertility rate as one which is still insufficient to counter the effects of demographic aging. In its first section, the chapter summarizes those aspects of demographization processes that are relevant for this dimension of reproductive racism and contextualizes the increasing interest in demography within German migration policy debates in the 2000 and 2010s. In the following section, I elaborate on both narratives referred to here. After this, three epistemic preconditions common to both narratives are analyzed: the speculative production of long-term population projections; the construction of a distinct future migrant reproductive genealogy; and the reductionist perspective on generative behavior. This chapter thereby offers an intersectional theoretical approach to the analysis of racialized policies of reproduction.

Introduction

How many children do ‘migrant women’ in Germany have on average? What is their ‘generative’, ‘demographic’ or ‘reproductive’ ‘behavior’? These questions, arising from debates on the future demography of Germany, have become key areas of research for demographic think tanks, quantitative sociologists and policy consultancy groups. But why should these aggregated statistical data be of political interest and for what purposes might such data be used? Which statistical practices and discursive frames are necessary to construct and emphasize a segregated migrant's behavior—even extending into future generations of people born in Germany? In the following I will scrutinize current demographic narratives on migrant fertility and analyze how these narratives link, in the context of a revival of demographic rationalities within German policies, exclusive migration regimes with policies of reproduction.