Asymptotic Behavior of Critical Primitive Multi-Type Branching Processes with Immigration

Under natural assumptions a Feller-type diffusion approximation is derived for critical multi-type branching processes with immigration when the offspring mean matrix is primitive (in other words, positively regular). Namely, it is proved that a sequence of appropriately scaled random step functions formed from a sequence of critical primitive multi-type branching processes with immigration converges weakly toward a squared Bessel process supported by a ray determined by the Perron vector of the offspring mean matrix.