1Migrant children face different obstacles during their pathways in school. While in some national contexts, e.g. in the French or the German one, systemic discrimination operates latently, in others, such as in the Chinese one, institutional discrimination operates through a two-track system and a clear separation between public schools and less prestigious private schools for migrant children (Xiong 2015). Consequently, the functioning of the school system plays its part in structuring young people’s aspirations, opportunities, and pathways. Migrant families in China coming from “rural” areas consider moving to urban areas as a means of finding jobs, earning better wages, and achieving upward intergenerational mobility. The case of Li, a young man who followed his family and left his hometown when he was a child and went to school in Shanghai, is emblematic of some of the difficulties encountered by migrants in China who are trying to escape poverty and unemployment, and who place their hope in their children’s education. But processes of hierarchization, inferiorization, and subordination often accompany spatial mobility and the settlement of those newcomers in large Chinese cities, entering—in Eliasian terms—an established-outsiders configuration, as can be observed in countries experiencing international migration flows. These processes affect the fate of internal migrants, rural migrants, and their children in China. In this article, three aspects are discussed on the basis of Li’s case: the role played by aspirations and social context, the importance of opportunities in getting a second chance, and how spatial and social segregation can become a natural order in some young people’s lives.

Dissonance Between Parental Aspirations, Influence of Context, and Individual Agency

2At the time of the interview, Li was 23 years old. His father was the first in the family to move to Shanghai for work. The rest of the family followed, except for Li, who stayed with his uncle until Li moved to Shanghai at age 11 and went to school there. Li’s school trajectory, as he describes his engagement in school, is characterized by an average motivation, but several times during the interview he expressed his aspirations to acquire more education, a consequence of his first working experience in particular.

3Parental aspirations play a crucial role when it comes to children’s education, and research has already revealed the high educational aspirations of migrant parents in the Chinese context (Koo 2012). Li’s parents are blue-collar workers and have three children. The financial investment is high for the family as their children go to school. Leaving their region of origin and moving to Shanghai are things associated with better earning opportunities. They work extra hours as general operatives in a factory in Shanghai to earn a living and finance their children’s study. Parental aspirations also take the form of encouragements, as Li declares: “My father encouraged us to study.” But those aspirations and the value set on education did not prevent Li from dropping out of school before finishing junior high school and starting work while he was still a minor.

4From the perspective of his early life course, Li’s case shows how the combination of institutional school context, familial situation, and individual circumstances negatively influences the pathways of migrant children. While the organization of the school system is such that it is quite difficult for migrant children to enter junior high school and for families to pay the fees for private school—a form of institutional or systemic discrimination—early adulthood is a phase characterized by instability, leading in some cases to biographical breaks, with negative consequences in multiple life domains. Li’s pathway in school is very similar to those of some migrants’ descendants interviewed in a Franco-German research project (Tucci et al. 2011), who performed some activities outside the context of school or work, with a negative influence on learning engagement, leading in some cases to the emergence of a counter-school culture among young people, as described by Paul Willis in his book Learning to Labor (Willis 1977). Such activities in the French case are mainly illicit, but in Li’s case it is his addiction to online games that strongly contributed to his dropping out of school and subsequent trajectory. Such an extracurricular activity necessitates more favourable financial conditions than his parents could provide and would be willing to assume, and contributes to disengagement from school. For Li, playing games in Internet cafés, as many young people do, was the main driver in his turning point towards distancing from school and engaging in working life, as he puts it: “Work can earn some money, money can go online.” However, opportunities to find a job are better for migrant children in the Shanghai context than for migrants’ descendants in France, living in segregated neighborhoods. The latter encounter a tight labor market and a high unemployment rate. Entering blue-collar jobs like their parents did is something migrants’ descendants in France hardly accept, and the opportunities for occupational upward mobility in such jobs are rather scarce. But despite more favourable conditions in terms of employment, rural migrant children in China have a lower chance of being promoted than urban ones do, and rural migrant children have a greater chance of getting unstable and lower-paid jobs, as research shows (Qin et al. 2018). Li’s case shows the complexity of the processes at play in the construction of school trajectories: the nexus between institutional obstacles, local context, and familial or individual agency is determining in early adulthood.

Aspirations over the Life Course

5Aspirations are not stable, and despite the high parental aspirations identified in migrant families, the lower concreteness of those aspirations is an important issue for understanding the school pathways of children of migrants from a low social background (Kao and Tienda 1998). While dropping out of school can be irreversible because opportunities are blocked by the functioning of the school system, engaging in working life becomes an alternative. The experience of unsatisfying job conditions and limited chances of being promoted contribute, at the same time, to changing aspirations in terms of skills acquisition or in reactivating aspirations that were put on stand-by for a while.

6The willingness to get back to school is sometimes the driver leading to a reengagement in school. For Li, whose first job as a security guard was boring and who declared, “I felt I was decadent in my head and wanted to gain more knowledge,” going back to school to complete junior high school became an option. At that time, he was relatively young, but finishing junior high school was not possible due to institutional obstacles. Getting a second chance, i.e. having the possibility to return to school, is crucial, as research shows (Dustmann, Puhani and Schönberg 2017). In countries like France, for example, dropping out of school is irreversible in many cases. Second-chance schools exist, but they are not part of the general school system. In contrast, in case of failure at school, the German school system enables students to gain further general education, and to catch up in order to get a diploma or acquire professional skills (Tucci et al. 2011). Such a second chance in school pathways is an institutional answer that is adapted to changes in terms of educational and occupational aspirations among young people. Li’s aspirations in terms of skills acquisition were indeed latent, and several times during the interview he expressed his wish to achieve a better position in his job. Such aspirations could only be translated into action once they met an institutional (or private) training offer.

Experiences of Social and Spatial Segregation

7Li experienced blatant spatial segregation at school, his building being separated by a wall from the school for local children. This systematic institutionalized separation between migrants and local children at school (Lan 2014) favours the perception of young people from rural areas as disruptive elements potentially influencing the school pathway of local children in a negative way. Li’s story about his subjective experience at school is interesting for at least two reasons. Firstly, despite his assignment to a school targeting exclusively children of rural migrants, Li does not express any feeling of unjust treatment, except when he talks about the teacher’s violent behaviour. Secondly, Li does not give any answer when asked whether he could explain why local children are separated in such a way from migrant children at school. Being at school only with migrant children and separated from local children by a wall does not seem to be something that can be questioned.

8This contrasts with the situation of minority children in France living in socially deprived neighborhoods and expressing a strong feeling of socio-spatial exclusion and of unjust treatment by the school institution because they are selected out of the more prestigious general school track that leads to better chances of entering and succeeding in university (Tucci and Keller 2019). Li’s silence concerning school spatial segregation and the limited opportunities of school success can inform us about the Chinese system of inequality production, assigning migrants and their children to lower positions in society. The established-outsiders configuration—which emerges when spatially mobile persons arrive in a place and are stigmatized by the established majority, engendering the emergence of an “us” as described by Elias and Scotson in their classical text about the Winston Parva community (Elias and Scotson 1965)—is not automatically accompanied by a feeling of injustice or anger towards the majority. This is what we observe in our research on the pathways of migrants’ descendants in France and Germany. The feeling of unfair treatment is strong among migrants’ descendants in France, while disadvantage in terms of school trajectories seems to be “accepted” by migrants’ descendants in Germany, who less frequently express discrimination and frustration with a school system that disadvantages them very early on in their pathways (Tucci and Keller 2019). In Germany, migrants’ descendants have incorporated their foreigner status and the position they are assigned to as children from the working class belonging to the minority. Is this absence of discourse about unequal treatment linked to the difficulty of naming unequal treatment and discrimination, or is it the sign of an interiorization of the place assigned in the education system and in society as a whole? The “sense of one’s place” described by Goffman can be relatively strong among outsiders as a sort of submission to the established order. In Li’s case, spatial segregation becomes a natural order that leaves little room for frustration and feelings of injustice. This social context and its consequences on young people clearly conflict with their aspirations in terms of educational and occupational aspirations.