Psychological distress of rural-to-urban migrants in two Chinese cities: Shenzhen and Shanghai

Using survey data collected from Shanghai and Shenzhen, two popular destinations for rural-to-urban migration in China, this study found a significantly higher level of psychological distress among rural migrants in Shenzhen compared to those in Shanghai, which are partly attributable to the lower earnings and longer work hours among rural migrants in Shenzhen. In addition, a range of structural (e.g., socioeconomic status and work hours), social (i.e., frequency of home visits, perceived social support, and neighbourhood social cohesion), and personality (i.e., optimism) factors were found to be important correlates of psychological distress. Compared to those in Shanghai, rural migrants in Shenzhen were socioeconomically disadvantaged but psychosocially advantaged. A significant and negative interaction effect between optimism and long work hours was also found. Without the presence of the observed psychosocial advantages among rural migrants in Shenzhen, the Shenzhen-Shanghai gap in rural migrant’s mental health would have been even greater.     

Destination choices of Chinese rural–urban migrant workers: Jobs,amenities, and local spillovers

Using the 2014 China Migrants Dynamic Survey, we analyze rural–urban migrant workers’ destination choices after the global financial crisis, with an emphasis on jobs, amenities, and local spillovers. By using an equilibrium‐sorting model, this paper disentangles local spillovers from local attributes in the estimation process. We employ both an artificial instrumental variable and the provincial highway passenger flow in 1979 to tackle the endogeneity issue. After controlling for the network effects of migrants from the same origin, we find a separate and strong preference for colocating with a large population of migrants, regardless of origin. The results remain robust when we take into account labor supply‐driven migration, spatial autocorrelation between provinces, different industry definitions, and regional differences within provinces. Our results imply that due to institutional barriers, the rural‐migrant community will still be a very important factor in the foreseeable future. In addition, as the ongoing industrial upgrading and transfer policies in China may lead to a westward movement of rural–urban migrants, the movement will be expedited when the older, less educated, or lower income migrants relocate.     

深圳与全国区域经济联系的测度及分析——基于人口迁移模型的研究

深圳工业化过程中同全国各省区建立起了资金、技术、市场以及人才(包括劳动力)方面的广泛联系。本文基于外来人口指标,构建了深圳户籍人口迁移模型,并加以测度及分析,从人口迁移角度得出以下结论:首先,深圳同全国各省区经济联系强度与两地的人口规模成正比;其次,与两地的交通距离成反比;第三,深圳与全国的经济联系呈辐射状的圈层结构;第四,外来户籍人口数与两地收入差距相关性不明显。进而分析了形成这种联系格局的其他影响因素,并对深圳加强与全国区域经济联系提出政策建议。     

THE ROLE OF FAMILY SUPPORT AND OTHER FACTORS IN RETURNING HOME

The present study focuses on the effect of social and other support from the family in the place of origin of migrants and how it impacts upon migrants’ propensity to return. The study uses longitudinal data from a project in Northeastern Thailand called the Nang Rong Project. The analysis shows that monetary support from the family left behind has a significant effect on migrants’ propensity to return home. Household strategies of migration have played an important role in explaining migration in the Nang Rong setting. At the individual and household level, education, occupation and household size were strongly associated with migrants’ propensity to return to their original village. Among the social support variables, duration of migration has significant effects on migrants’ likelihood of returning home. Three variables—marital status, wealth index and whether the person came with an immediate family member—were found to have weak associations with the dependent variable. A major finding from this study was that migrants who have higher education are more likely to stay at the destination.     

Migration and Death Ceremonies On St. Kitts and Nevis

Since British slave emancipation in 1838, Afro-Caribbean men and women of St. Kitts and Nevis in the Leeward Caribbean have emigrated and returned in order to sustain their local societies. Economic uncertainty and social oppression both at home and abroad have inspired Kittitians and Nevisians to develop mobile livelihood strategies in order to tap ever-changing sources of employment. Labor migrants from the two islands have therefore often resisted permanent commitments in any one direction except for occasionally returning home. These periodic returns are important to the local community because the migrants usually bring back money and gifts to kinsmen and friends. A related obligation, especially in recent years, has been for migrants to return to family funerals. Funeral attendance confers economic advantages on both permanent residents of St. Kitts and Nevis and the migrant workers abroad. The money and gifts brought back by returning migrants help sustain the local community. The returning migrants themselves are also assured a warm welcome in case they are forced to return in the future by changing conditions abroad, a not unlikely possibility. Local mortuary practices on St. Kitts and Nevis are therefore not simply symbolic displays but also important economic events.     

场域理论视角下的国际移民研究——以安徽内陆新侨乡为例

论文介绍了场域理论,并运用场域理论对中国内陆山区新侨乡的国际移民潮进行分析。通过对场域、资本和村民＂习性＂的研究,从外在的社会结构和内在的个体心理结构两方面来考察新移民活动,为新侨乡研究提供一种新的观察解读模式。笔者认为新移民场域内资本的流动和转换是推动国际移民潮出现和变化的关键因素。随着各种资本向内陆山区农村的转移,新侨乡的范围和国际移民的数量将会继续扩大。     

Rural Youth Migration Trends in Australia: an Overview of Recent Trends and Two Inland Case Studies

Much of what has been written on the topic of Australian rural youth migration trends and processes has often proceeded from data‐free, or data‐poor grounds. In this context, this paper analyses recent trends in youth (15 to 24 years of age) migration for a temporally‐consistent set of Statistical Divisions (SDs) in inland rural Australia, and for local government areas within the Northern Tablelands and Slopes and Ranges of northern New South Wales and the Western Australian Central Wheatbelt. The paper finds that rates of youth loss from rural regions have increased over the past twenty years. Yet the patterns, processes, causes and impacts of rural youth migration are distributed in a spatially‐uneven fashion. Some remote areas are receiving net migration gains while booming ‘sea change’ coastal regions have experienced heavy losses. While the ‘flight to the bright city lights’ syndrome is evident, relatively high proportions of young people in the Northern SD of NSW move within their immediate region. Nevertheless, some common understandings concerning youth mobility were also confirmed. Gender differentials in migration propensity between women and men are evident even at quite local scales. Young people are also more likely to search out capital cities than the rest of the population. Most inland areas still continue to experience heavy losses of local youth. A more precise understanding of rural youth migration trends is an important stepping stone in the establishment of a reinvigorated research effort into young rural people's perspectives of their changing life chances in their home communities.     

Aged migration to coastal and inland centres in NSW

The household characteristics and migration behavior of elderly migrants in Australia are compared. The results indicate that "inland movers are significantly different [from] coastal movers in socioeconomic and demographic respects, such as age, mobility, the location of the nearest child and previous occupation."     

Family education support to rural migrant children in China: evidence from Shenzhen

Rural migrant children have become a fast-growing population in China as a consequence of the large-scale population flow from rural to urban areas. Besides the dual-structure hukou system, which restrains rural migrants from upward mobility, family capital also plays an important role in providing family educational support to rural migrant children. Using the data from P District and N District of Shenzhen in 2013, this paper explores the present status of three dimensions of family capital and five aspects of family educational support to Chinese rural migrant children, as well as the correlation between family capital and family educational support from perspectives of migration status (hukou), life course (children’s age), and school type. Constrained by inadequate family capital in multiple dimensions manifested by less education, lower income, and limited social networks, etc., parents of rural migrant children provide less family educational support in nearly every aspect compared with parents of urban local children. Among rural migrant children, those in private migrant schools receive the least support from their parents.     

福建省城镇流动人口的空间分异格局——基于六普数据的分析

文章基于第六次人口普查数据,运用数理统计、空间自相关和GIS等方法,分析了福建省城镇流动人口的空间分异格局。研究发现,福建省城镇流动人口在沿海多而密集、以区外流动为主,开放性和活跃性明显,而在内陆则少而稀疏、以区内流动为主,封闭性和粘滞性突出,但沿海和内陆均存在内部异质性;大城市流动人口密集且来源地广泛、对人口城镇化影响大,中等城市流动人口规模较小,小城镇对区内流动人口有一定吸纳能力。文章还探讨了城镇流动人口空间分异特征的驱动机制、对区域社会经济发展和城镇化的影响,并提出相关政策建议。     

High-skilled Return Migration and Knowledge-based Development in Poland

It is by now well known that return migration of the highly skilled can have a significant impact on knowledge-based development in the regions to which they return. Whereas previous research has mainly focused on developing and newly industrializing countries, this paper looks at high-skilled return migration in an East European transformation economy, namely Poland. In our paper, we propose an analytical framework which integrates migration theory and regional development perspectives. Based on narrative interviews with high-skilled return migrants in Warsaw and Poznań, we show that high-skilled return migrants have an impact on economic development by acting as both investors and innovators, i.e. that they transfer and successfully integrate financial means as well as different types of knowledge into these local economies. Furthermore, the Polish example illustrates that social relations and institutional context are crucial in understanding how high-skilled return migrants contribute to knowledge-based development.     

“Middling” Chinese Returnees or Immigrants from Canada? The Ambiguity of Return Migration and Claims to Modernity

This paper investigates the conceptual overlaps between transnational return migration and immigration by drawing on a qualitative study of Mainland Chinese return migration from Canada. The paper argues that reframing return migration as a distinct type of immigration draws attention to the citizenship vulnerabilities experienced by “middling” returnees who are not privy to the preferential treatment given to highly skilled returnees. They come to be considered as “foreigners” in their homeland because they have naturalised elsewhere. The paper also explores the double diasporic identifications of Mainland Chinese returnees from Canada; it highlights the tensions and fissures manifested in secondary diasporas, particularly in light of China’s growing prominence in international business, foreign diplomacy and cultural exchanges. The paper suggests that social encounters that marginalise such migrants in Canada are reproduced in China. The returnees navigate such encounters by mobilising their transnational affiliations to different national contexts.     

The working and living conditions of college-educated rural migrants in China

In the past one and a half decades, Chinese cities have witnessed an influx of college-educated rural migrants. Until now, there has been little systematic research on the working and living conditions of this growing population. The objective of this paper is to empirically examine similarities and differences in living conditions between college-educated rural migrants, non-college-educated rural migrants, and local urban workers. The data are from the 2010 National Health and Family Planning Commission Survey of China’s migrant population. Our study has produced several findings. First, the monthly income of college-educated rural migrants is significantly higher than that of non-college-educated rural migrants and is similar to that of college-educated local urban workers. However, less-educated rural migrants earn more than local urban workers with similar levels of education. Second, while college-educated rural migrants work fewer hours than non-college-educated rural migrants, they work longer hours than their local urban counterparts. Third, local urban workers receive greater social benefits than college-educated rural migrants, whose benefits are better than those of non-college-educated rural migrants. Overall, while college-educated rural migrants enjoy more favourable working and living conditions than non-college-educated rural migrants, they remain disadvantaged when compared to urban workers with a similar level of education. These findings highlight the insurmountable institutionalised exclusion and discrimination that imposes significant barriers on rural-origin people to reap the benefits of higher education.     

中国女性农民工务工活跃度研究——基于全国29省份调查数据与陕西省实证研究

基于全国范围内(除京沪港澳台地区)女性农民工外出务工调查数据,提出女性农民工务工活跃度新概念,并将该概念分解为四个活跃度因子:务工距离、务工时间、务工地点数以及务工频数,用层次分析法得出各因子的权重并计算各省市区的活跃度。引入对应各省市区农民人均纯收入进行回归分析,与多项式模型拟合较好,活跃度随农民人均纯收入的减小而有增大的趋势。分别对四个活跃度因子的地理空间分布进行研究,运用聚类分析法进一步探究务工活跃度结合农民人均纯收入在地理空间上的分布特征,并在全国范围内划分出7个区域类型。最后以陕西省为例,用Logistic回归模型得出女性农民工的个人、家庭及其他因素对务工活跃度有较大影响。     

Welsh migration to England in the mid-nineteenth century

Conventional migration theory suggests that rural to urban movement was a one-way once and for all movement which resulted in the severance of ties to a rural homeland and the gradual adoption of an urban lifestyle and culture. Analysis of Welsh migration to English towns in the mid-nineteenth century suggests that by no means all migrants conformed to this stereotype. Whilst Welsh migrants displayed similar characteristics to other rural-urban movers and fitted easily into an urban labour market, they were able to retain many of their rural traditions and customs in an English urban environment. They also maintained close links with Wales whilst some engaged in return migration. Although easily accepted into English urban society, the Welsh were able to live in two culture worlds for much of the nineteenth century. It is suggested that detailed longitudinal studies of other migrant groups will demonstrate diversity in the extent to which rural traditions were subsumed by urban culture in the nineteenth century.     

From left-behind children to young migrants: the intergenerational social reproduction of rural migrant labor in China

ABSTRACT

Growing in number in the last two decades, rural migrant workers in China have completed intergenerational replacement, and young migrants have become a principal part of the migrant population. However, the process of such intergenerational reproduction has not been thoroughly examined. Based on field studies in the Chinese countryside, this paper analyzes the mechanisms of intergenerational reproduction of rural migrants from the perspective of rural communities, families, and school education. “Left-behind” rural communities, their migration-oriented social culture, and the cognition of rural–urban differences as constructed through migrant parents facilitated a subjective willingness for migration among left-behind children. Exclusion from urban-biased rural education is often the final external thrust for their migration. Having finished the transition, the households of a new young generation of rural migrants are experiencing a different crisis of reproduction. This paper argues that there is a systematic rupture between labor, households, and rural society and that this presents a critical development trap for China.     

Unsettling Migrant Reintegration: The Serial Risk-Taking of Returning Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) to Cordillera,Philippines

In 2017, the Philippine government boosted its campaign on Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) reintegration, a set of programmes designed to aid returning Filipino labour migrants. In this paper, I examine migrant reintegration through the case of returned migrants to the province of Benguet, Philippines. Rather than use “sustainability of return” as main focus of assessment, I foreground instead the historical geographies undergirding the current reiteration of this migration policy. By doing so, I demonstrate how the “gambling” practices of returned migrants can be read as not an easy acquiescence to the neoliberal imperative for self-entrepreneurship encouraged by the Philippine state. In highlighting gambling as an embodied strategy emerging from and through imperial histories, I argue that migrant reintegration gets revealed as rehearsal of certain colonial logics that have oriented certain peoples to the labour of serial risk taking for survival. Close attention to return migrants’ gambling practices raises urgent questions regarding the relentless push for entrepreneurship as development solution.     

宏观背景因素对海外移民企业家创业的影响--以澳大利亚的中国商业移民为例

论文基于2019年对阿德莱德和墨尔本两个州府城市的实地调研,主要探讨三个问题:一是宏观背景下的商业移民如何改变其人口与社会经济特征;二是宏观层面因素如何重塑商业移民的发展机会结构;三是中澳经贸关系现状对商业移民有何影响。研究显示:中国和澳大利亚的制度因素和经济背景,对于商业移民的影响在不同历史阶段其作用并非等效。中国近20年来的经济发展对于商业移民特征的转变起着主导作用,澳大利亚移民政策则在呼应改变的同时,间接促成了商业移民内部的组内差异。对于商业机会结构的转变,中国国内经济发展带动的需求市场起到良好促进作用,而澳大利亚的经济发展格局和相关的移民政策与制度作用则更为关键。     

移民网络、社会资源配置与中国东北新移民--美国旧金山湾区田野调查札记

在田野调查访谈的基础上,本文以美国旧金山湾区的中国东北新移民为研究实例,对社会资本和非制度性的社会资源配置在当代中国的跨国移民活动中所扮演的具体角色进行考察和分析。本文认为,近年来迅速崛起的东北新移民已开始成为当代中国国际移民潮的主要成员之一。近10多年来东北地区之所以会出现大规模移民海外的现象,其中既有古典经济学移民理论所提出的经济层面的原因,也有中国社会内部制度变迁的深层因素。而非制度性社会资源配置机制中的强、弱两种关系网,尤其是海外新移民社会中的弱关系网络,则对当代东北人的跨境迁徙活动及其在海外移居社会寻找工作等方面做出了莫大的贡献。     

Go East,Young Cadre: Experiments in Inter‐Provincial Training of Party and State Managers in China

This article situates China's local policy experimentation in the broader context of policy experiments in decentralized political systems, through a case study which represents a local state response to China's transition to a market economy. With growing regional and urban–rural inequalities evident after the initial reform period (1978–1994), local party leaders of inland provinces devised strategies for addressing these inequalities and encouraging public–private sector mobility among party officials. County and township‐level leaders pursued local policy experiments in which they selected and sent officials to find private‐sector work in China's booming coastal cities. Initiated in the 1990s and peaking in the 2000s, these policy experiments and inter‐provincial transfers demonstrate the discretion that local officials possess to conduct programmatic/policy experiments in a unitary political system and show how officials resort to extra‐institutional strategies in order to bridge perceived knowledge gaps. The ultimate demise of these programmes illuminates the challenges to extra‐institutional policy innovations in transitioning states.