Migration Policies, Urban Poverty And Rural To Urban Migration In China

Since middle 1980s, China has been undergoing large scale rural-urban migration. On realizing the enormous economic gains accompanying the reallocation of labor, the central government gradually loosened the restrictions on rural-urban labor mobility. However, after large number of city workers being laid off in the state-owned enterprises reform started in the middle 1990s, many discriminating migration policies were imposed by local governments of cities in order to alleviate urban unemployment and urban poverty. The ever increasing number of migratory workers in recent years shows that the discriminating migration policies failed to hamper the rural labor from migrating into cities for better life, although some of them leading a life even poorer than their rural life without inclination to go back home, making the urban poverty even worse. Through modeling the migratory workers' migration decision process, this article proved that it is the migratory workers' rational choice under current circumstances to migrate and stay in cities even facing discriminating migration policies and severe poverty in cities. Hence, the failure of discriminating migration policies in hampering rural-urban migration and alleviating urban poverty is a natural corollary. In order to do so, we first piece together relating information including the personal characteristics of the immigrants, the goals they are after in migrating, the choices they are facing, the labor market they enter, and the institutional environment of the cities, on the basis of accumulated literatures. After collecting information, we make several assumptions according to the information and set up a model to analyze the immigrants' choice, their migration preference, their job searching processes and their migration decisions. Through analyzing the model, we prove that the failure of discriminating migration policies in hampering rural-urban migration and alleviating urban poverty is unavoidable. More precisely, we develop a heterogeneous rural-urban migration model to analyze the phenomenon. The model assumes that most of immigrants from countryside can only become floating population in cities, and search jobs in competitive labor force markets; the Chinese rural-urban gap is very large, farming income is different from that earned in cities. We show that the more severe migration policies , the stronger peasants' desires for rural-urban migrations; discriminating migration policies even make some floating people from countryside poorer in cities than in countryside but have no desire for leaving cities and sink to be poor urban people.