Age at First Marriage or Cohabitation Among First-, Second-, and 2.5-Generation Immigrant Women, Finland 1987–2020

Immigrants and their descendants are increasingly forming families across Europe, yet little is known about how immigration background shapes first union entry in emerging immigration contexts. Here, we examine whether immigrant generation, age at arrival, and sending region are associated with entry into opposite-sex first unions for women in Finland from 1987 to 2020. Treating cohabitation and direct marriage as competing events, we estimate cause-specific hazards in separate accelerated failure time models. We find a systematic bifurcation in union entry: while nearly all immigrant groups forgo the modal Finnish path of first entering a nonmarital cohabitation, specific subgroups—including the second generation, first generation arriving during adolescence, and women from the Former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, North America, South Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa—exhibit accelerated transitions to direct marriage. While these findings demonstrate heterogeneity in the pathways by which immigrant women enter unions, with no single narrative of delay or convergence capturing the full picture, the overall pattern of later and less cohabitation and higher levels of direct marriage suggest that immigrant women face substantively different cultural, institutional, and social capital conditions than nonimmigrant women.