Settlement Intention of New Migrants in China's Large Cities: Patterns and Determinants

Against the background of globalization, urbanization, and the relaxation of household registration system, China's large cities have witnessed massive inflows of new migrants since the start of the new millennium.The integration of new migrants into destination cities hinges on their ability to and inclination to settle down in the destination. New migrants' settlement intention has drawn extensive attention from policy-makers and the media, but such topic remains under-researched in China's migration literature. Previous studies on migrants' settlement intention have focused merely on poorly educated rural migrant workers, devoting insufficient attention to the increasing diversification of new migrants' socio-economic status in the Chinese context.Based on a questionnaire survey conducted in six cities, this article aims to investigate patterns and determinants of new migrants' settlement intention in China, with a particular focus on the heterogeneity of migrants.Our descriptive results show that new migrants generally have rather strong intention to settle down in destination cities, and that 58.8% of them intend to live in the destination city permanently. However, their intention to settle down may not be translated into actions due to the lack of capabilities of settling down. Results from logistic regression models indicate that female, well-educated, high-income, established migrants and migrants whose migration destinations are located in the central and western regions and who have local hukou status,abundant local social capital, strong local identities, and high life satisfaction have stronger intention to settle down in the destination city, and that income levels, hukou status, social networks, identities, and places of residence play a dominant role in this regard. We further divided new migrants into 3 cohorts: skilled migrants who have attained a university degree or college diploma, labor migrants with high school education or below, and business migrants who run small business such as restaurants, factories, and workshops and found that determinants of migrants' settlement intention vary across different migrant cohorts. Specifically, business migrants have the strongest intention, followed by skilled migrants and labor migrants. Skilled migrants' intention to stay permanently in the destination city is determined by their social linkages with local residents and their sense of belonging to the destination city, while that of labor migrants is jointly affected by their occupation, property status, social capital, identities, and places of residence. With regard to business migrants, human capital, social capital, household registration status, and places of residence play a dominant role in shaping their settlement intention.Our findings suggest that China's new migrants become increasingly heterogeneous in terms of the settlement intention, and that they integrate into the host urban society through different paths. Therefore, it is necessary for governments at all scales to enact different policies designed for particular migrant cohorts.