Children Migrating With Parents And The Migrant's Settlement Intention

Based on the data of the China Migrants Dynamic Survey in 2017,this study analyzes the impact of children's migration on their parent's settlement intention in their working places.Children's migration is a branch of the family migration,and many of the previous articles have studied the effect of the family migration or the children's migration on the settlement intention and the integration of migrant workers,but the reverse causal problems are often ignored.The settlement intention and integration will,in turn,affect the migrant workers' decision whether to bring their children around with them,so the effect they estimate is biased.In this study,the age of the first child and the average mobility of the community are selected as instrument variables to solve the reverse causal problems and missing variable biases.The article shows that children migrating with their parents has a significant promoting effect on migrant workers' settlement intention in their working places under the control of other variables and taking into account endogenous factors;the OSL regression underestimates the effect of children's migration on migrant workers' settlement intention.In other words,the increasing popularity of "family-based migration",compared with "individual migration",can significantly promote the migrant worker's settlement intention.In addition,the stability of the results was tested by incorporating children of different ages and genders into the model.The results show that while boys migrating with their parents have a slightly greater impact on parents' settlement intention than girls,but there is no significant difference between boys and girls.In terms of age,the effect of pre-schoolage migration on settlement intention is greater than that of school-age group.The migrating children promote both the settlement intention of father and mother,and the promotion effect is not biased towards the mother or the father.The potential influence mechanisms of children's migration on parents' settlement intention include children receiving better education in cities and the promotion of migrant workers' social integration.These conclusions show that in order to steadily promote the urbanization process of our country and promote more capable migrant workers to settle down in the cities,we can no longer treat migrant workers as they used to,economically accepted,and socially rejected them.Especially as the trend of family-based migration is becoming more and more popular,migrants should be supported in terms of their education,public services,and so on,so that they can gradually be equalized with the local people in terms of their rights.The ultimate goal is to help migrant workers take root in the inflow.