Is linked migration overlooked in peri-urban Shanghai? Uncovering the domino effect of driving away interregional migrants

Abstract

As China continues to urbanise and both intra- and inter-regional migrants move out from their home villages, local economies adapt and form new ecosystems with linked migrants. As a result, local policies targeting one group of migrants may unintentionally affect the other. To reveal it, this paper explores how households' housing choices shaped by local policies have linked upstream and downstream migrants together and how the policy targeting one group of migrants may disadvantage the other. Using a household survey and in-depth interviews in 108 natural villages in peri-urban Shanghai, the research findings reveal that the local government's earlier efforts to ‘urbanise’ local farmers attracted these farmers to resettle in nearby urban areas and lease their rural dwellings to interregional migrants attracted by manufacturing development. The landlords use the rentals to finance their new urban dwellings. Thus, the two groups of migrant families are tied together by the housing market. These linkages mean that new policies trying to dislocate migrants in peri-urban Shanghai are likely to affect migrants upstream and downstream. Interregional migrants might find similar informal accommodation elsewhere or return to their home villages, but ‘urbanised’ farmer families can be trapped and even de-urbanise as a result of their rapidly declining income. This research contributes to the growing international literature on the interdependency of migration and stresses the need for policymakers to consider the externalities of local exclusionary migration policies.