This paper adopts a life course perspective that captures the migration trajectory for rural-to-urban migrants in China during the observation window. By taking this trajectory approach, we aim to advance the understanding of divergent ruralto-urban migration patterns in China and their determinants and consequences. We use data from the Survey of Internal Migration and Health in China (IMHC) and focus on individuals' migration experience between age 14 and 40. First, we apply sequence analysis to characterise the main rural-to-urban migration patterns by different timing, duration, frequency, and direction and identify seven common patterns. We next examine the determinants of these patterns. The results suggest that demographic characteristics, socio-economic background, and hometown characteristics shape migration trajectories in complex ways, highlighting that social origin can substantially determine migration patterns of rural Chinese. Furthermore, we examine via a counterfactual framework how the seven migration patterns shape migrants' occupational attainment while taking account of self-selection into different migration trajectories. The findings show that (i) there is self-selection into migration trajectories that has implications for occupational status and (ii) nontransient adult urban migration is associated with higher occupational attainment whereas other types of migration are not.

The author explores how parents’ internal migration within China affects their children’s socioeconomic aspirations and extends previous research by (1) comparing left-behind and migrant children, (2) considering multidimensional aspirations, and (3) testing mechanisms that explain the effects of parents’ migration on their children’s aspirational pathways. The first finding is that left-behind and migrant children have higher migratory aspirations than rural children. However, left-behind and migrant children do not differ from rural children in terms of occupational aspirations. The multidimensional perspective revealed that migrant children do not want mid-status or high-status occupations in smaller cities; rather, they prefer traditional rural-to-urban labor migration pathways, working in low-status occupations in big cities. Finally, the findings verified that most of the hypothesized mechanisms cannot explain the effects of parental migration. The persistence of the effects of parental migration on migrant children suggests that institutional mechanisms may exist to explain the effects.

This article proposes a life-course measure of the legal pattern that accounts for the overall legal pattern over the lifetime of migration and explores the two main pathways to labour market outcomes: selecting into legal patterns associated with different levels of labour market outcomes and realising different labour market outcomes within each pattern. Results suggest that labour market outcomes depend on which legal patterns migrants end up with instead of what they realise within each pattern. Particularly, migrants with more human capital and better social capital select into legal patterns associated with better labour market outcomes, but they do not realise better labour market outcomes given the legal patterns they experienced. From the dynamic perspective, the economic integration of migrants depends on legal patterns. Migrants in legal patterns that initiate with temporary resident status experience economic integration over time. The growth rate is larger for the patterns that involve a transition in legal status. This paper makes important contributions to the literature. First, it identifies holistic legal patterns that account for the legal status over migrants' entire migration history. Second, it sheds light on the selection into different legal patterns and highlights selection as the major process in explaining migrants' labour market outcomes. Third, it shows how legal patterns, jointly shaped by initial legal status and legal transition, determine migrants' economic integration. Finally, the inclusion of temporary resident status, beyond the illegal-legal dichotomy, enriches our understanding of how liminal legality over the lifetime of migration shapes labour market outcomes.