Migrant Workers' Citizenization: A Perspective Of Public Service

"Citizenization of Migrant Workers" has been considered as an important issue during China’s urbanization process. At present, migrant workers are facing binary segmentation of Household Registration System, Agricultural Land System and Public Service System. Under these obstacles, the progress of "Citizeniation of Migrant Workers" seems a long way to go.When studying the "Citizenization of Migrant Workers" of foreign countries, we can find that there are also lots divisible policies, such as the Poor Law in the United Kingdom, Internal Passport in Soviet Union etc. But all these policies had brought about several negative influence on society and economic development, and eventually been abandoned. The reason why China’s binary segmentations exist is that the city governments fear overloading financial expenditure and worry about the city capacity. Actually, financial burden can be solved by raising the level of public service and "City Disease" is caused by discriminatory policies rather than freedom of migration. So the process of "Citizenization of Migrant Workers" urgently needs to eliminate these binary policies.Raising the level of public service of migrant workers is a key breakthrough to solve the problem of "Citizenization of Migrant Workers". Once the public service gap between migrant workers and urban household population is getting smaller and smaller, the household registration system will return to its basic function. The expansion of the public service needs the coordination between the central government and local governments. As the beneficiaries of urbanization and industrialization, the city government should act as a core public service provider for migrant workers (especially in the pension and health), but in order to relax the local government’s financial pressure and mobilize its enthusiasm of reforms, the central government should offer direct subsidies to migrant workers by way of transfer payments in compulsory education and accommodation of migrant workers. Another way is to establish a payment mechanism to "buy" the public services from the city government, such as the U.S. Social Security System,"Education Vouchers","Property Tax". With the regard to public service without payment mechanisms, we can take the easiest first. For example, the city government can introduce foreign high-quality vocational and technical education to substitute the higher education in the short time.