Are migration and settlement environment-driven? Environment-related residential preferences of migrants in China

Abstract

This paper evaluates the relative weight of local contextual factors (including environment-related factors, labor market, social services, housing market, and migratory patterns) in shaping the “relative stickiness” of migrants at the city level in China. Previous studies focused on the volume, ratio, and pattern of migration while ignoring the complexity of the place-bound “political-industrial ecology” (PIE) that would reinforce or stiffen the migrants' “stickiness” to the destination city. This paper uses the city-level data of migrants' intention ratios of permanent urban settlement and home-buying, respectively, as a pair of proxy measures of the city's relative stickiness and attractiveness. We use Multi-Scale Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR) to detect the variation of migrants' sensitivity to environmental reconstruction-related factors at the city level in China. Our analysis reveals a north-south divide in migrants' stickiness in China, which is opposite to the conventional understanding that the migrants are stickier to the high-wage and high-quality ecological environment. Different PIE in North China and South China can explain why migrants are stickier to North China that have negative environmental externalities, while rapidly flowing into and frequently out of the south-southeast coast which has richer environment-related amenities. It is revealed that the relative stickiness of migrants is also attributable to the specific migratory pattern, institutional context, and cultural distance, as embedded in the varied PIE in a country as geographically diverse as China. The findings support the notion of PIE where an uncertain and nonlinear relationship exists between the environment and migration. The social services and migratory pattern usually outweigh the environmental factors in the migrants' settlement and home-buying decision-making in China today.