1Since the 1980s, with fewer restrictions in the household registration system, the channels for urban-rural mobility gradually opened up, and a great deal of the rural population entered cities to work. The family strategy of city immigrants at an early stage is in the form of “divided households,” that is, the wife or husband works in the city while the spouse or the children remain in the rural areas. In the past one or two decades, with the first generation of migrant workers aging and returning to the rural areas, the new generation of migrant workers successively entered cities and became the main body of immigration (Sun and Liu 2008). Unlike the appeal that was held for the first generation of migrant workers who left their hometown to make a living, that for the new generation of migrant workers has changed from “improving economic status” to “long-term residence.” Most of them do not have farming experience, so their identification with the city has exceeded that of the rural areas. They do not want to live in cities temporarily but intend to live permanently and move the whole family to the city in which they reside (Wang 2010). The migration experiences of Niu’s family have reflected the typical living trajectory of the two generations of immigrants since the 1990s.

Mobility Trajectory: From Stay-at-Home Children to Second-Generation Immigrants

2Niu’s parents are first-generation immigrants who went to Shanghai in the 1990s. Since they had not laid a solid foundation for a social network and a life there, Niu, as a second-generation individual, had to stay at home and become one of the first-generation immigrants’ stay-at-home children. It can be stated that stay-at-home children are a social group that emerged simultaneously with migrant workers. Since this group is affected by the mobility status of parents and family arrangements, its scale and quantity kept changing (Duan, Lai and Qin 2017). By the year 2015, the number of stay-at-home children in China reached 68,766 million, of which stay-at-home children in rural areas numbered 54,925 million, amounting to more than 1 in 5 of the total number of children in the whole country. Some research has shown that stay-at-home children might have some unhealthy emotions once their parents leave for work, have poorer performance in their studies, and are more at risk for school violence. Although the academic circle has been appealing to efforts of “destigmatization” and “De-problematization” for the group of stay-at-home children, the negative effect of the migration of parents on the growth of and educational quality for stay-at-home children is an undeniable fact.

3Niu was fostered at his aunt’s home before the age of 10, and the school he attended was a semi-boarding school that was mainly for stay-at-home children. In the mixed-age student group, Niu often experienced violence at the hands of senior students. At the same time, due to a lack of parental supervision and limited by the local education level, Niu’s performance in his studies was unsatisfactory. Under such circumstances, Niu’s parents had to take him to Shanghai. From Henan to Shanghai, Niu’s identity changed from that of a stay-at-home child to that of a migrant child, and such a change of identity also reflects the change of rural-urban migration in the twenty-first century in China, namely, from individual migration to family migration.

4Although in mobility Niu realized an individual identity transformation from a stay-at-home child to a migrant child, this did not change his social identity from peasant to citizen. Due to restrictions by the identity system for each immigrant, Niu could not enjoy educational resources equal to those of urban children. What he experienced in Shanghai was transient and conditional; for example, he could only get admitted to schools that were especially for children of migrant workers. The document issued by the State Council in 2003 on the migrant workers particularly emphasized that the governments of the places of arrival should solve the problem of migrant children’s difficulty in attending school. Similarly, the Shanghai Municipal Government has also issued relevant management measures aimed at gradually including the existing schools for children of migrant workers in Shanghai’s normal and standardized management system. Nevertheless, there are still many problems in the specific implementation of the policy. The relevant local authorities have not fully incorporated the education of migrant workers’ children into the local educational system, and the majority of schools for migrant workers’ children are still subject to approval and management by the government of the place of departure, as well as operated by personnel from the place of departure. There is no strict examination and evaluation of the conditions and educational quality of the schools, and the management of the schools is also beyond the reach of the government of the place of departure. Some founders took to running schools as an income-generating industry and are reluctant to invest more in school operating conditions and faculty (Zhao 2013). Therefore, some first-tier cities have also taken unannounced actions to ban schools for children of migrant workers, causing the children at school to transfer to other districts or to return to their hometown (Tan 2011).

5In such an institutionally segmented educational system, migrant children from various places, like Niu, are in the uncertain status between city and rural area, and they are likely to fall into the process of “staying at home–flowing–staying at home again.”

Household Registration System: The Obstacle of Integrating into Cities

6The household registration system is a special management system in Chinese society and has created a barrier that has segmented the social structure between urban and rural areas since the foundation of China (Lu 2003). After the country’s reform and opening-up, although immigrants from rural areas have formed a free flow in terms of geographical space, it is still difficult for them to enjoy the rights and benefits of moving into the cities because the threshold of household registration—which determines things such as medical care, education, social insurance, and the right to education for the children of immigrants—is still an issue that has received much attention and discussion.

7Niu’s experience is a microcosm of the educational status of migrant workers’ children during China’s rapid urbanization process. Without Shanghai hukou, Niu could not take the college entrance examination and had to go back to his hometown to take the college entrance examination at the senior high school stage. Affected by having to transfer schools several times, his school achievement was affected, and at last he was admitted to a junior college in Henan Province. Xiong (2010) also found in the comparative study between schools for migrant workers’ children and public schools that although the migrant workers’ children studying in public schools were highly motivated, they sensed more discrimination by the mainstream society of the city and held more pessimistic views on their personal prospects; thus, there is a significant “ceiling effect” in their growth process.

8In the 1990s, Shanghai implemented the blue-print residence registration policy (a residence booklet with a blue cover, which is different from the red cover of the local hukou book), which means that people who have bought a house in Shanghai can obtain a hukou, something between the official hukou and the temporary hukou. Families holding a blue-print residence registration are entitled to social welfare, such as medical treatment and children’s education. Niu’s parents gave up the opportunity to redeem educational qualifications for Niu when they had sufficient housing purchasing power; instead, they chose to expand their business. Unable to take the college entrance examination in Shanghai, Niu got his first taste of being obstructed by household registration. Facts have proved that the blue-print residence registration is only the byproduct of a stimulation of local real estate development in a specific period. After 2000, with the cancellation of the blue-print residence registration policy, the standards of talent introduction policies in various places became stricter. Apparently, it is difficult for most migrant workers of which Niu is a representative to obtain citizenship through the market redemption mechanism, and this directly affected the trajectory and final result of Niu’s education in Shanghai after the age of 10. Although Niu’s family had already purchased a house in Shanghai at the time of the interview, with the continuous increase in qualifications, such as academic qualifications and years of payment of social security, the threshold for Shanghai’s settlement policy gradually rose, and Niu was still unable to reach the point level that met the requirements in a short period of time. Niu and his family have to make efforts to strive for equal citizenship, so that the third generation can avoid repeating the twists and turns their parents have suffered.

9The household registration system is the metavariable in the discussion of integration of immigrants into cities in China, and it is also the most important institutional factor that affects immigrants’ practical experiences and subject feelings in cities. For more than half a century, the city has been enjoying special treatment in the separate administration of city and country and its material supply. Residents with local hukou and “immigrants” enjoy different institutional treatment (of course, the case of Shanghai is not unique). Although migrant workers have become the main force in Shanghai’s urban construction, compared with urban residents, the migrants’ work and life lack corresponding security (Zhao 2013), which directly leads to feelings of loss and inferiority among new urban immigrants.

Identification Dilemma: Mental Imprints for the Immigrant Identity

10Household registration restrictions not only directly affect the social rights and life trajectories of immigrants, but they also affect their identity and social stratum identity. Although Niu had lived with his parents in Shanghai since he was 10 years old, he returned to Shanghai after going to his hometown to study for several years; he thought he could be considered as half-Shanghainese. Niu’s uncertainty about region identification and social stratum identification is the psychological response of second-generation immigrants based on their mobility status.

11In the Chinese context, citizenship and household registration systems are inseparable (Whyte 2010). Hierarchical stratification through urban citizenship allows city administrators to selectively incorporate the elites of immigrants into the system without having to bear the cost of labor reproduction of most of the floating population. With economic absorption and social exclusion, in the face of various institutional arrangements in cities, rural-urban migration groups have been floating at the edge of the mainstream society of cities (Solinger 2009).

12It is worth noting that the establishment and maintenance of a social fact related to the identity of immigrants depend not only on the arrangement of the state system, but also on the construction and wide recognition of related groups in daily interaction (Zhao 2007). The experience of immigration has affected the social stratum identification of immigrants. Although Niu’s parents are engaged in freight shipping, which could earn an abundant income, the annual work income of Niu also reached about 200,000 yuan, which exceeded that of many white-collar workers after college graduation. However, when describing his own social class, Niu thought he was in the lower class of society. In his life course, his rural life experience, college diploma, and working and living experience in the suburbs after coming to Shanghai all set the tone for his identity. In the narration process of the individual life history, the family migration history, there is often a kind of collective memory of rural life and migration experiences, one which starts a topic from “we,” and “we” represents all the migrants coming from the countryside to the city with similar experiences. Meanwhile, they unconsciously separate themselves from “city dwellers”/“Shanghai natives.”

13The institutional identity segmentation has already been internalized as the mental mechanism of groups through the mainstream discourse of society, and the experience of interaction in migrants’ daily life. The so-called institutionalized identity segregation is reflected not only in the institutional arrangement of migrant workers’ identity by a registered residence system. As the third identity in Chinese society, the two others being urban residents and rural residents, “migrant workers” has been constructed and widely recognized, which also constitutes the legal basis of the existing “migrant workers” system (Chen 2005). Although objectively speaking, Niu realized the upward flow of his social stratum in terms of economic standards, in the psychological sense there is still an invisible structural barrier.